


act of infinite optimism

by zukoscomet



Series: roots and wings [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Babies, Brief mention of possible miscarriage, Childbirth, F/M, Family Feels, Fire Lady Katara, Fluff and Angst, Katara and Zuko (Avatar) are Parents, Kid Fic, Marriage, Pregnancy, Unplanned Pregnancy, depiction of pregnancy complications
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:41:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25896865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zukoscomet/pseuds/zukoscomet
Summary: “...the biggest gamble in the world. It is the glorious life force. It’s huge and scary—it’s an act of infinite optimism.”It takes Katara and Zuko nine months to become parents.Or: a window into the ups and downs of Katara's first pregnancy, month by month.
Relationships: Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), Katara & Sokka (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar), Ursa & Zuko (Avatar)
Series: roots and wings [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1934692
Comments: 45
Kudos: 474





	act of infinite optimism

##  **before:**

It began with the little blue-eyed, brown-haired girl.

Or rather, it began with the young Fire Lord observing her from a distance.

Naturally, the girl reminded him very strongly of Katara, with her white-furred parka and the beaded loops that disappeared into an intricate braid on the back of her head, but she was a novel sight for Zuko for another reason, as were all the other children she was playing with in the snow.

If there was one thing about Zuko’s youth that hadn’t been so terrible, it had to be that he was never lonely. Sure, he’d never wanted to play with Azula and then his cousin had left for the war, but there had always been other children around for him to interact with - the offspring of ministers, generals, advisers, governors. The vast majority of them had been pampered little brats but then, at that age, he’d been a pampered little brat just like them - Katara would probably vouch that he could still be one at his worst - so it hadn’t mattered much. There had been the servants’ kids, too, and although his father had forbade him from mingling with them, they had been a part of the palace’s atmosphere, always in his orbit and contributing to that active buzz that he remembered.

He wasn’t exactly sure when the nobility had stopped being accompanied by their children, when his father had banned the staff from living in with their families, but there were no kids at the palace now. Sometimes, in the rare moments that he got to stand still and listen for a second, he noticed the unnatural quiet.

The opposite was true here, a thousand miles away from Caldera City in the South Pole. The air was filled with shrieking and giggling as the children rolled around in the fresh layer of snow and their parents looked on, somewhere between amused and grateful for the five minutes peace.

Funny, that of all the things that made the Southern Water Tribe seem a world apart from his home in the Fire Nation, that was the thing he picked up on most.

He wasn’t the only one.

Across the fire, Katara was looking at the little girl, too. He wondered what was going on in her head - if she was making the same observation as him, if she was reminiscing on a similar memory from her own childhood, if she was missing the community spirit of the tribe that had nurtured her when she was that small - but then she glanced over at him with a wistful smile on her face and instantly he knew _exactly_ what she was thinking. He could see it in the softness of her eyes as they flickered in the firelight, in the rosy flush to her cheeks, in the way one hand came up to close around her mother’s pendant and the other unconsciously shifted to rest nearer her abdomen.

She was thinking that that little girl could be hers. _Theirs_. 

Before he got to decide how he felt about that immense notion, a voice broke through.

“So, Zuko,” 

Zuko jumped so much that he nearly spilt the contents of his bowl into his lap. Fortunately, no one else was watching him, the others deep in conversation about the trials and tribulations of town hall construction.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” Kanna said apologetically, reaching out to pat his arm.

He returned her half-smile. “No, no. It’s okay. It’s just... watching the children playing made me realise that there are none in the palace anymore.” 

“Ah, I see.” Katara’s grandmother gave him a sage nod. Then she said it. “Well, perhaps if the spirits look favourably upon you, that will change some time soon.” 

If it had just been the words alone, Zuko might have been able to interpret them differently - like now he was the Fire Lord, he could allow the servants to move their families back in and he could encourage an environment in which visitors could feel safe enough to bring their children along - but there was no misconstruing the suggestive look Kanna directed between he and Katara.

Zuko choked on his soup.

He couldn’t say that this was the first time he’d been cornered about his (vague, if not entirely non-existent) plans for siring the next generation of the Royal Family. Quite the contrary. Considering how much effort it had taken to convince the Council to sign off on his and Katara’s marriage, it really was remarkable how quickly discussions had turned to the emphasising the importance of an heir and establishing a strong succession. One of his advisers - a bitter old man among the ones who probably privately wished that Ozai were still Fire Lord but Zuko couldn’t get rid of because of the political consequences of doing so - even had the audacity to accuse him of risking the Fire Nation’s stability by having Katara on birth control, less than a month after their wedding. That had perhaps been the one and only occasion where a precedent set by one of his forefathers had actually come in handy - _“My great-grandfather, Fire Lord Sozin, was childless until he was eighty-two years old, and you’re bothering me now at_ twenty _-two?”._

No matter how many times he shut them down, the topic kept cropping up but - excluding a few very general talks with Katara, mostly all taking place before their engagement - this was the first time that the topic had been introduced into his personal life. He had already decided that this was worse - _far_ worse. Atleast with his Council, there always seemed to be something more dire going on that he could distract them with and move them away from the issue of his procreating - or his complete lack thereof.

There would be no such distracting of the Southern Water Tribe’s matriarch and now everyone else was paying attention to him.

Zuko hoped that only he had heard what Kanna said and Katara and the rest of her family were staring at him just because of his uncontrollable coughing and spluttering. 

No such luck.

“Yeah, Zuko, when are you gonna make me an uncle?” Sokka grinned at his new brother-in-law. If looks could kill, Sokka would be a dead man two or three times over as Zuko glared across the fire with the strength of a thousand suns.

“Well, uh-” Zuko cleared his throat uncomfortably. “It’s a bit early for that, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t too early. He could no longer say he was _only_ twenty-two. He was just twenty-two. There was no more hiding his shortcomings behind the excuse of youth. He was a young man, but he _was_ a man and if he was old enough to take care of the entire Fire Nation’s interests, then surely he was old enough to take care of a single child, too. And Katara... well, Katara had seemed old enough to be a mother the whole time that he had known her. The general consensus seemed to be that she had been that way for much longer before, but with her twentieth birthday had passed the threshold where Katara could be considered at a young but appropriately normal age for motherhood - especially since she was married to a monarch. Especially since she was married to a monarch with no current feasible option for an heir beyond his elderly uncle and his unstable little sister.

What was the stupid rhyme that Azula and Ty Lee used to mercilessly tease he and Mai with as children? 

_First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage_. 

Zuko was two-thirds of the way through that process and halfway through wishing the ground would swallow him up when Hakoda stepped in to save him.

“Leave the poor boy alone.” Zuko has always liked Hakoda but he has never been so _grateful_ for his father-in-law before. “They haven’t even been married six months yet.”

He could have left it at that. Everyone else seemed to have taken the authority in Hakoda’s tone to mean the conversation was over and had gone back to eating their suppers, but the uneasiness at his poor reaction lingered in the air.

“It will. Eventually.” he said quickly, before the talking moved on and the awkwardness was sealed in the past. “I’ve known all my life that I would have to have atleast one child to succeed me as Fire Lord, preferably two to be safe, but there’s so much other stuff going on in the world right now - trying to reform the Fire Nation, trying to fix things with the other nations, trying to help Aang to rebuild the Air Nomads - starting a family is just really not that important to me.”

Zuko knew he’d made a big mistake the second that the words left his mouth. 

“Right now. It’s not that important to me _right now_.” he added hastily but it was already too late. The damage was done.

Katara had stayed quiet throughout the whole exchange. He’d assumed it was because she was a little embarrassed herself - wanting to have a baby was one thing, talking about it in front of her dad and her elder brother quite another - but he’d assumed wrong. Very wrong. She’d been silent because she’d been watching him closely, gauging his feelings on the matter, trying to judge just how long she was going to have to wait for Zuko to come around to fulfilling her deepest desire. Inevitably, she hadn’t liked the answer.

Sokka had to understand how much that had stung his sister. For years after their mom had died, long before they’d ever stumbled across Aang frozen in the iceberg, he had been the sole subject of Katara’s strong motherly instincts. He tried to rest a comforting hand on her arm but she shook him off.

The clatter of her spoon as she dropped it into the empty bowl was deafening.

“Thank you for making us all dinner, Gran Gran, it was lovely but it’s been a really long journey and I’m exhausted. Would you mind if I went to bed a little early?” she said stiffly.

“Of course, dear, go and get some-”

Katara was up and gone before her grandmother had even finished speaking, her travel-sack slung over her shoulder and speeding away as fast as she possibly could without actually running. Zuko scrambled to follow her, cursing under his breath as he sank up to his calves in the snow with every step while Katara seemed to just glide along the surface unhindered like a spirit and disappeared into the igloo. Finally, after giving up on lifting his feet at all and shuffling his way through the snow drifts instead, he caught up with her at the threshold of their hut.

“Are you alright?” 

He knew full well that she wasn’t. He could have probably started a fire with the friction hanging over them if he tried, but Zuko was still figuring out how this whole marriage thing worked - the learning curve slowed massively by the lack of inspiration from his own parents - and it seemed like an acceptable opening line into the discussion they were now going to have to have. 

Clearly, it was another error in judgement as she threw her stuff down next to their bed with strong vehemence.

“I’m fine.” she said coldly, inventing something of particular interest in her bag to give her a reason to keep her back turned to him.

He sighed. “Katara-”

She whirled around to face him and Zuko instinctively took a step back. Not that that would save him if she decided to bring the ice dome down on his head.

“I said I’m fine!” she yelled.

Zuko knew that he should have almost certainly taken that as his cue to back down, get the hell out of there, and come back later when she’d cooled off and he'd had a chance to rehearse what he was going to say in his head, but this didn’t feel like something he could - or _should_ \- walk away from.

“I’m sorry for what I said, okay? It was inconsiderate of your feelings and I should have known better. I know how much you want to be a mom, Katara, really I do, and you’ll make a _wonderful_ mom one day, but we’ve talked about this; before and after we were married. We’re just not ready for a kid right now.”

“No, _you’re_ not ready for a kid.” Katara spat, angry tears beginning to spill over. Zuko flinched at the accusation, but the lash of hurt quickly manifested into something else, something more familiar.

“Someone tried to assassinate me a few weeks ago so no, I guess I’m _not_ ready to bring a child into the world.” he snapped back at her, fists balled at his sides and his body driving out the cold as he heated up with fury.

He knew he was exaggerating the significance of it a little. As far as assassination plots go, it was a pretty weak attempt. The guy hadn’t even made it past the first row of his soldiers. Most of them didn’t. The odd couple that did quickly found that a Kyoshi Warrior or three was not an easy take. And the one killer that actually had managed to dodge the guards and the Kyoshi Warriors had found that the Fire Lord, borne to the throne through a near-constant struggle for survival from birth, was not an easy take either. That had been many years ago, though, right at the beginning of his reign when the world seemed to be out to get him. Zuko was proving his worth as Fire Lord more and more each day and as the failed attempts stacked themselves up as a reminder of the futility, the threats on his life had become fewer and farther between. 

It wouldn’t be too long before they gave up - the new future of the Fire Nation and the majority's willingness to embrace it was cracking down hard on the old guard - but right now, they did still happen. Zuko didn’t really fear for his own life anymore but it wasn’t an environment fit for any child, let alone one who would represent the consolidation and continuation of all the things these people hated most about its parents.

“I’m sorry.” Katara sniffed as she sat down on the edge of their pallet, taking a clumsy swipe at her tears with her cuff. “That was unfair of me.”

“No," Zuko let go of his anger with a breath of steam, his knuckles cracking as he unfurled his hands. "I’m the one who should be sorry. I haven’t been completely honest with you. I’ve been letting you think that this... this _thing_ , about me wanting to wait to have a baby, is just about pragmatism when it isn’t.” He sat down beside her. For a moment, there was silence as Zuko stared at the floor between his feet and Katara tried to force herself to calm down, before he asked:

“What is it that you picture when you think about you and I starting a family together?” 

The familiar images, nurtured by long hours of daydreaming, came flooding in. 

Joined hands on her swollen belly, feeling the little kicks and flutters and rolls beneath their palms. Being there for all the firsts - seeing them smile, laugh, walk, run, speak, develop their own quirks and characteristics. Indulging them in silly games and jokes, encouraging their imaginations as much as they did in teaching them the more important life lessons. Helping them learn how to use their gifts, elemental or otherwise, and imparting the traditions of their mixed and rich heritage. Sneaking an extra treat under the table when the other parent said no. Tending to scraped knees and cut hands with a gentle touch and a reassuring smile. Letting the evenings disappear as they sat around the fire while they ate dinner and told each other about the days they’d had. Tucking their children into bed, reading them a story and kissing them goodnight, over and over and over until one day they grew up and flew the nest to pursue their own lives.

Katara didn’t really experience the sudden and complete epiphanies that Zuko did. Her revelations came slower, like putting together a puzzle where the pieces were scattered around the room for her to uncover, but this - this hit like her a lightning bolt sent straight from the spirits above.

_I think about being like my mom and dad,_ Katara realised, _so does Zuko._

The conclusion must have shown on her face, as he understood without her saying a word.

“I think about all those things, too. That girl we saw playing in the snow? I’ve thought about her before, about us having a little daughter that’s just like you. Our Kya.” he smiled weakly and her gut twisted when at hearing him say that name. “I’ve thought about getting to pass down all the things that Uncle Iroh taught me to my son or daughter, and maybe some of the stuff that I’ve learned on my own, too.”

With the weight of a century pressing down on him, he heaved in a breath.

“But then I think about Sozin. I think about Sozin leaving his best friend to burn to death, how he waged war on the world because he truly believed that he had a right to own it. I think about Azulon, how he destroyed your people, took away the waterbenders and killed your mother. I think about Ozai; how he wanted to get rid of his newborn son purely because he didn’t have _‘the spark’_ , how he was going to murder me just because he was ordered to, how the only reason he didn’t was because he got to take his father’s life instead. I think about how my own father did _this_.” He turned his head to present the scarred side of his face. “I think about Azula. How she became so warped and tormented that she was ready to kill us both just so she could be Fire Lord. How she never really stood a chance of being anything _other_ than what she is. And, mostly, I think about myself, the parts of them that live on in me, of all the things that I’ve done in my life.”

Zuko took her hands in his.

“I want our child to be better than them. I want our child to be better than _me_ , but I am _so_ afraid that it’s in the blood. That you and I will have a child that's just as bad - _worse_ \- and I’ll be powerless to change it. That’s why I’m scared of this. That's why I'm not ready.”

“No one is born bad." Katara said softly. "No one.”

“But if no one is born bad, then it’s up to the parents to shape them, right?”

She could sense where this was going. She wasn't going to let it.

“ _Zuko._ ” Katara tilted his chin up as he hung his head and the utter despair in his eyes broke her heart in two. “You have shown more love and care in the last five minutes for a child that doesn’t even exist yet than your father showed you in your whole life. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

He coughed up something that almost sounded like a laugh. “That’s a pretty low bar to set.”

She snorted at his obstinacy. Tears still glimmered in her eyes but the rage had since faded, replaced by a soft compassion. “What I’m saying is, no parent knows what they’re doing and every parent makes mistakes. We’ll probably make a dozen a day, but we’ll do a lot more things right by them. We’ll teach them how to be kind, caring, but we’ll teach them to be strong, too, how to stand up for the things they believe in. We’ll show them how to use their powers responsibly and that goes for their bending and their crowns. We’ll be there for them whenever they need us and most importantly, we’ll love them. Probably a little too much.” she smiled, brushing his hair back from his face and over his shoulder. “You’ve got a bigger heart than you realise, Zuko. You have so much love to give. If you could just let it guide you, and you won’t just be a _better_ father - you’ll be a _great_ father.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

Somewhere deep down, Zuko knew that his worries would never be completely assuaged until they were confronted head on, but those three words offered a temporary reassurance stronger than anything else she could have said. 

If he couldn’t trust in himself, he could always trust in Katara.

Zuko knew there was a lot more that needed to be said between them - that they needed to iron out the specifics and draw up plans for their future, to hold discussions and reach compromises. Talking it out would be the adult thing to do. With he the Fire Lord and Katara the Fire Lady - new to her position but well-practised by years of ambassadorial work - that was probably what they knew how to do best. Instead he found himself reaching out, framing her face with his hands and pressing his mouth to hers. Any hope of sensibility winning out was lost when Katara parted her lips to meet him, fingers twining at the back of his neck. She deepened the kiss and they tumbled into the mish-mash of blankets, pillows and furs that loosely defined their bed.

That night, long after Katara had curled up beside him and shut her eyes, Zuko curled an arm around her waist, pressed his hand to the toned planes of her stomach, over her empty womb, and fearlessly allowed himself to imagine what the world might look like with their child in it with them.

##  **month 1:**

Katara has always known her body well, better than a usual person would.

She might have put it down to her unique powers of bending. The water showed her the way, revealed secrets that were closed off from the majority. Through her gifts, she could follow the paths of blood, explore the inner workings of organs and muscles, encourage the water to soothe and mend the damages of illness and injury. That feeling might have unnerved others. It unnerved _her_ sometimes when she allowed herself to think of Hama - how this power could be so easily and devastatingly abused - but Katara was a healer, not a shell hollowed out by her own rage. To her, healing with the water was the most natural thing in the world.

But even before she had stuck her burning hands in the river and eased her pain, Katara had had an almost primal awareness of herself, an unshakeable instinct carved out from years out on the ice, fostered and instilled by her Gran Gran.

That’s how she knew something wasn’t right almost straight away.

At first, it was nameless; an unprovoked chill on her spine, a disembodied tingle of wrongness lurking in her subconscious, an unexplained foreboding in her gut.

Then, it began to manifest into something she could really identify.

A full month passed without her bleeding but she convinced herself it wasn't anything to worry about. She'd never been the most regular girl in the world, she reasoned. It was rare for her to be this late, sure, but not completely unheard of and she _had_ been a little stressed lately. In any case, it would probably come over the next few days, she told herself. But it didn't. Instead came the symptoms that she couldn't explain away so neatly. She suspected when she started beginning her mornings with a taste in her mouth that could only be described as if she’d been salivating over a rusty metal chain all night. She suspected when her assistant, Yumiko, brought her a bouquet of flowers plucked from her garden at home - a consolation prize for a rough week tangling with some stubborn governors - and her answer was to burst into tears. She suspected when she had to force Zuko to tip his usual cup of chamomile before bed down the drain because the earthy smell was turning her stomach threateningly.

By the time she found herself folded up on her knees behind her desk, losing her breakfast into an unfortunate vase while the poor adviser she’d summoned to discuss the Fire Nation’s education reforms hovered over her nervously, she knew.

She knew, and she probably could have confirmed it by herself quite easily, but she cancelled her next engagement and went down to seek the physician’s opinion anyway.

Pregnant, she said.

She’s _pregnant._

She knew. This was the moment she had waited years for, and yet “I can’t be.” was the first thing to come out of her mouth.

Doctor Maho took it all in her stride, just like she seemed to do with everything else. She was a formidable woman and a good fit for the position of Zuko’s physician. Her unflinching stature was a needed counterbalance for her Fire Lord’s emotional volatility. She reminded Katara of her Gran Gran in that way, though it’d be far nicer to have the woman herself here with her now to deliver the news, but she wasn’t going to dwell on that thought for anything more than a cursory recognition. The last thing she needed right now was for her wildly unpredictable hormones to have her start sobbing in front of the severe royal physician.

“You are, my Lady. You're four, perhaps five, weeks along. It's still very early days, which is why you should be reducing stress levels and taking these,” she said calmly, setting a bag of pre-natal supplements next to Katara on the examination bed. “-to help minimise the chance of a miscarriage, but you are most definitely pregnant. You’re a healer. You know the symptoms. You suspected it yourself when you came down here.”

“I can’t be pregnant.” she repeated insistently. “I’m on birth control. I’ve taken that gross pavia root tea every morning after Zuko and I have been together that way. _You_ give it to me.”

She was infuriated by the smile that tugged at the usually tight-faced doctor. 

“I do, but as I told you when you first asked me for it, it’s not a hundred-percent effective. Accidents are unlikely, but they do happen from time to time.”

_An accident_. Katara had never imagined that her first pregnancy would be anything other than a perfectly planned-and-executed series of manoeuvres - that was practically how her whole life worked here in the strict and uniform Fire Nation - but as the realisation sunk in, the surprise began to subside and the joy filter in.

She settled her hand on her innocuously flat abdomen and a shock shivered down her spine. There was a baby growing in there. _Her_ baby.

She was going to be a _mom_.

Katara didn’t even realise she was crying until the physician patted her hand gingerly.

“I understand. A pregnancy is a lot to take in at the best of times and you have it particularly tough. It’s unexpected, it’s your first child and on top of that, this baby will most likely be the heir to the Fire Nation.” Maho said in a softer tone. So she did have a bedside manner after all. “Clear your schedule, if you can. Have the day on your own to think things over. The tradition is that I’m supposed to inform the Fire Lord myself, but I assume that he’d much rather hear the news from you.”

_Zuko_.

This wasn’t just her child. It was his, too. Zuko was going to be a father.

Her excitement was immediately dampened by a tall wave of nerves. 

The last four years had seen some gradual improvement in Zuko’s outlook on children. The Council had finally realised that their pestering was not going to get the Fire Lord to reproduce any faster than he wanted to. The subject of an heir had been reluctantly dropped from the agenda, but doing so had actually helped their case rather than hindered it. Zuko had become far more relaxed about the idea of children after that, in that he didn’t completely freeze up like a fox antelope whenever kids were mentioned now, either professionally or personally. Katara had forgotten that Zuko was actually very good with kids. He readily interacted and played along with any children that crossed his path, whereas before the weight of expectation - everyone around him seemingly looking for a sign in his actions, even her - had made him tense around kids. Occasionally, he even indulged her in some prospective comments that made her stomach flip like _“Izumi is a really nice name for a girl”_ or _“I hope our kid gets your nose, not mine”_ or _“Please, Agni, can we not have one that takes after Sokka.”_

But she'd already misjudged how far he'd come once before. Little more than a year ago, she'd asked him if they could try for a baby and he'd bluntly, after only a second or two of hesitation, told her no. Her high hopes had been quick to spiral them into a fierce argument - probably the worst one they'd ever had. Of course, they'd reconciled, and Zuko had said the same thing he'd been saying for three years straight at that point:

_One day._

Except now their one day had arrived of its own accord and she still had no idea how he would react.

She would find out later that night, when she came to him waiting in their chambers for her. 

It was a surprisingly warm night given they were well into the hold of winter by now and Zuko, ever a creature of the heat, was making the most of it as he stood out on their balcony, sunning himself like a lizard. His hair was unbound, falling like a bolt of finest black silk down his back. The full royal regalia that he’d left in that morning - robes, headpiece, shoulder pads and all - had been cast off and re-hung on the mannequin in the corner, leaving him in only a plain red tunic and charcoal-coloured pants, but still he looked every inch the Fire Lord that he was. In fact, as he closed his eyes and lifted his face to the dying light, the gentle rays from the sunset illuminating his profile and his lean silhouette in burnished orange, he looked like some sort of god. Like Agni, the fire spirit that Zuko prayed to (and whose name he more often used to curse with), embodied in a human form.

When she was little, her mom had told her a story about the Fire Nation’s royalty being descended from the dragons. Zuko had set her straight on that one years ago - _“It’s just a legend. Maybe we were the first people to learn firebending from them but we’re not related to them. How would that even happen? A dragon and a human... you know,_ doing it _? Gross.”_ \- but when he turned to face her and his reopened eyes glowed like the embers at the centre of a fire, it didn’t seem so implausible.

He was beautiful, this man she’d married, and while Zuko still held in his head a dream of a Water Tribe princess for a daughter, she wondered if this very much real baby that she held in her belly might just be like its father.

“We need to talk.” she started, trying her hardest not to let her nerves put a quake in her step as she approached him.

An amused half-smile played across his lips as he quirked an eyebrow.

“We always need to talk.” 

She could tell exactly what he was thinking. He was thinking that they were going to wile away the evening like they often did: discussing a new proposal put before the Council, ironing out the creases put into an old one by real-life application, speculating about what they were going to do next for their people. He was probably expecting her to tell him that she’d hit a snag with her drafting of the new curriculum - replacing the blinkered conservatism with a more open and stimulating environment conducive to the future Fire Nation they wanted to build - and that she’d like his advice to move forward. Not that she was about to tell him he was going to be a father.

“But not tonight.” he said, setting his teacup down on the stone wall before she could correct him. “It’s our wedding anniversary. I think we can afford one night to ourselves without talking shop?”

_Tui and La, help me._

Somehow (but quite understandably), the news of their impending parenthood had completely wiped away her memory of this morning; of him placing a loving kiss on her forehead, wishing her a happy fourth anniversary then slipping away to go do Fire Lord stuff with a promise of romantic plans for the evening.

She might have laughed at the irony of it, that this was happening to her - to _them_ \- on today of all days, if she weren’t so incredibly anxious.

Zuko, on the other hand, remembered perfectly and he was indeed looking at her like he had romance on his mind. He sidled over and leaned in for a kiss, but she pressed the heel of her hand to top of his sternum to hold him at a distance. “Uh, no. It’s not like that. It’s... personal, not business.”

His brow deepened.

"You're shaking."

So she was. Despite her best efforts to keep the turmoil hidden beneath a collected veneer, the arm keeping him at bay was trembling like an autumn leaf in a gale and when he gathered up both of her hands into his own, they were both quivering uncontrollably.

"Katara," he asked her urgently, holding her hands tight. "What's wrong?"

Katara had taken _some_ of Doctor Maho’s advice. She’d cancelled the rest of her appointments and gone back up to the confines of her study. Everyone knew not to bother the Fire Lady when she retreated there and shut the door behind her. What she hadn’t done was taken the time to absorb the news and calm herself down. Instead, she’d spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon figuring out exactly how she was going to tell Zuko about the baby. Not an easy task by any stretch, but she thought she knew her husband well enough to know what would work best for him. 

She’d come up with a complete strategy - how she would ease him into the conversation, how she would word the announcement, how she would manage the range of possible reactions - but in the face of his lovely golden eyes staring down at her, so full of concern, all of her plans disappear like morning dew evaporating into the air.

She can’t help but be perversely reminded of the first time she’d been allowed to accompany her dad and Sokka on a hunt. She had begged to go with them and, with some subtle encouragement from Kya, finally Hakoda had caved. They’d scoured the glaciers for hours, picking up a few promising trails but ultimately finding nothing. Just as they were about to turn back for the village empty-handed, Sokka had spotted a lone puffin seal, picking at the remains of a fish skeleton. Of course, Sokka had been overjoyed when he shot it, proud that he’d made an accurate hit over such a distance. Katara, on the other hand, had been instantly consumed with guilt and had even tried to heal the poor thing, but it was useless; the animal had been struck through the heart. It probably didn’t even know what was coming. She’d raged at her very confused brother for the rest of the day, for shooting dead an unsuspecting creature just happily minding its own business, until her mother and father had carefully explained to her the harshest lesson of all: that death was sometimes required for survival.

She was pretty sure that she’d eaten that seal in her stew that night.

Katara learned and moved on. She hadn’t even really remembered it until Zuko had shared a similar tale with her from his own childhood, about the eagle hawk and the turtle crab. Zuko still wasn’t sure what was the right thing, but Katara was. She’d never shot an animal herself, but she understood the necessity of it and never felt that kind of guilt again.

Until now. 

Except this time, Zuko was the unsuspecting creature, not a puffin seal, and he was about to be struck with fatherhood, not an arrow. But like then, this was a necessary evil. Just like they had to make it through the winter, he had to know the truth. 

Katara steeled herself and let the fatal words flow out on a breath.

“I’m pregnant.”

For a moment, Zuko was entirely blank and she wasn’t sure whether he had even heard her correctly, if at all. Then her words made some sort of contact. His eyes go impossibly wide. He stood up straight, dropping her hands as he retreated half a step. Katara’s insides plummeted to her feet and she briefly wondered if the baby, even though the rational part of her knew it was nothing more than a tiny, inert embryo at this point, could sense her fear.

“I-, you’re... _pregnant_?”

She nodded.

The sound of his swallow was as threatening to her as the click of a gun loading a bullet into the chamber.

“But-, but you drink that tea...”

“It’s only ninety-nine percent effective.”

“And we’re the one percent?” His voice squeaked, like someone had their hands clenched around his throat.

“Yes.” 

The veil of dubiousness, of plausible deniability, draped over his eyes lifted and finally, the realisation hit him with all its power. He stumbled a couple of steps further backwards into the balcony wall like he’d been winded and as his hand grasped the stone surface for purchase, he knocked his cup of tea flying over the edge. After a few seconds of silence, there was a tinkle of breaking china and a shout of surprise. Zuko peered over the balcony to find the pair of soldiers guarding the front door two floors below squinting up at them confusedly, an impact zone of shattered ceramic and a puddle of tea on the paving stones between them.

The Fire Lord flushed bright red.

“Sorry about that.” He waved a hand bashfully. “My wife just told me that she’s pregnant.”

“ _Zuko_!” Katara hissed. She reached out and grabbed hold of him by the sleeve, hauling him back through the folding doors and into the privacy of their bedroom, just as she heard a faint ‘congratulations’ called up from outside. “You can’t tell anyone yet. What are you thinking?”

“What am I thinking? I’m thinking that _someone_ should have to be as alarmed as I am right now!” he retorted, running his hands through his loose curtain of hair.

Katara knew very well that the bubble of laughter that swelled in her chest was inappropriate, poorly-timed and could be the thing to push Zuko to the breaking point, but still she couldn’t stop it from exploding out of her mouth. From the deepest pits of her stomach, Katara _laughed_. Zuko stood there, his heart pounding, utterly incredulous, as his wife - the ever dignified Fire Lady and master waterbender - descended further and further into a hysterical, uncontrollable mess of cackles. Unbelievably, he could feel a giggle crawling up his own throat, then suddenly he was laughing, too and he couldn’t stop. Neither could she. They laughed and laughed and laughed until their ribs felt like they were going to crack, their lungs were scrambling for air, their stomachs were twisted into knots and tears streamed unbidden.

“I-, we... we're going to have a baby?” Zuko asked when he finally managed to catch his breath and in amongst all the nerves and shock, she could see a glimmer of awe shining bright.

“Yeah. Yeah, we are.” Katara smiled as he reached out to dry her cheeks with his cuff. “I don’t know exactly when yet. Doctor Maho thinks I’m about four or five weeks in. When I’m a little further along, I should be able to use my bending to take a look and measure how big the fetus is, then we can estimate a due date.”

She tugged him forward and pressed his palms to her abdomen when he hesitated to do it on his own.

He just stared at his hands on her, on her belly that looked entirely unexceptional, and tried to force himself to comprehend that there was the beginnings of a baby there, the new centre of his universe taking shape.

“How do you feel?” she asked, her head tilted to the side.

_'I don't know'_ was probably the simplest description for the hurricane of emotions swirling in his head but he knew had to do better than simple. Katara was pregnant with their baby - _his_ baby. That was anything _but_ simple. "To be honest, I'm _terrified._ I'm gonna be someone's father and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, but-" He looked up at her with a shaky smile. "We're going to have a kid - a whole other person that's part you and part me out in the world with us. That's... amazing."

Somehow her smile brightened even further and Zuko wondered - though he knew that he was going to find out rather soon now - how he was ever meant to love anything as much as he loved Katara. He pulled her into his arms and held her as tightly as he dared. She let him cling to her as the relief flooded through her body, head rested on his shoulder, before she mumbled:

“You better go and tell those guards to stay quiet before half the Fire Nation finds out. Threaten them with treason or something.”

(The guards graciously agreed to keep the secret, no threat of treason required).

##  **month 2:**

Almost as though saying it out loud had acted as a form of summoning incantation, more and more signs of the baby she was carrying sprang up over the next month. When she was throwing up into the toilet bowl most mornings and at various unpredictable points in the day, when she was in a constant state of flux over whether she wanted to kiss or kill Zuko at any given moment, when her heart seared like a raging fire in her chest, Katara was quick to understand that maybe babies weren't so great after all.

Especially with the two specific symptoms that warred with each other.

She was exhausted. More than she’d ever been in her entire life. It was like her baby was constantly sucking every last drop of energy out of her. And yet, she couldn’t sleep. She hadn’t had a good night’s rest in weeks and for Katara, who enjoyed nothing more than sinking into her pillows and swaddling herself tight in a blanket, this was a special kind of hell.

That was why when Zuko began to fidget one night, after she had already been staring up at the shadows cast into their canopy by her candle for hours on end, she couldn’t help but feel a sick sense of satisfaction that he was suffering, too.

Then she heard a slight whimper, the sound muffled by his pillow, and deeply regretted ever having thought such a thing.

Zuko’s dreams had been truly horrible in the early years. When she’d first moved to the Fire Nation, Katara had struggled to adjust to the pervasive heat. With her skin damp and her chest heavy with the humid air, sleep had been an impossibility, so she had instead taken to exploring her vast, new home in the solitude the dark offered. In her midnight wanderings, she had often come across the Fire Lord; walking in the gardens, reading in the library, perusing the gallery, working in his favourite solar, trying and failing to do anything he could to distract from the torment of his own brain.

The plague of nightmares had eased when she’d started to share a bed with him. Her presence seemed to provide a comfort and warded off the terrors for him, except on the odd occasion when something had happened to stir up the trauma, like when his mother visited or he stumbled across a relic from his father’s reign. Ever since she’d told him they were expecting, though, they were rearing an ugly head again and the respites between his nightmares were shrinking.

For someone who was usually such a light sleeper, it was a cruel sort of irony that Zuko couldn’t be woken from a nightmare once he was in one. His mind turned into a prison and Katara had learned quickly that her attempts to bring him round just trapped him in further.

The only thing she could was wait for him to wake up, or for the nightmare to end of its own accord.

He tossed and turned. Sweat beaded on his forehead, along his collarbones, trickled down the length of his spine. She knew it was going to be a bad one when he started to murmur unintelligibly, his hands clenching the blanket.

Suddenly, Zuko flew awake and he screamed. _Really_ screamed.

The pair of guards tasked with watching their door for the night burst in so fast they hadn’t even properly armed themselves. If they were expecting to deal their Fire Lord being murdered, they had to be surprised to see him sat up in bed with no intruder in sight - hyperventilating something chronic but unharmed - and wildly looking around the room as if he didn’t know who or where he was.

“Get out.” Zuko croaked, gasping for breath, when he spotted their assigned guards and some others who’d come running from further up the hall in the threshold.

“But, my Lord-”

A frightened rage gave the Fire Lord his voice back. 

“I said get _out_!” he roared and fire flared from his mouth, filling the air with smoke. Every single one of the soldiers jumped back. Zuko was as of yet - Katara couldn’t help but feel it was only a matter of time before he _did_ do it - unable to generate lightning like the rest of his family, but he was still a firebender to be feared. The soldiers clearly _were_ afraid, but still they only left them alone with a nod of consent from Katara.

Zuko was staring down at his upturned hands like they didn’t even belong to him. Or maybe they did, and he’d done something awful with them.

She knew the latter was the case when he touched his scar.

“It’s alright, Zuko. I’m here. It was just a dream.” Katara said softly. She put her hand on his shoulder, his skin unnaturally cold and clammy, but he jerked away from her and struggled out of the bed.

“Go back to sleep. I want to be alone.”

“Zuko-”

But he was already gone, the black cloak he’d bunched around his shoulders to cover his bare chest billowing out behind him before the door slammed shut.

When Zuko said he wanted to be alone, that was almost always exactly the time when he shouldn’t be. Katara threw back the covers and shrugged her coat over her nightgown. The corridor was empty of anyone other than the watchmen, but she knew where she would find him anyway. Zuko always went to the Fire Lady’s - but what was still in his mind, his mother’s - gardens where the more pleasant memories were rife for him to comfort himself with.

Sure enough, when she quietly descended the steps, a cool breeze ruffling the trees and the skirts of her nightgown, he was there, his silhouette draped in the light of the full moon.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” he warned as she sat on the edge of the pond with him. 

She rested her hand over his. “You don’t have to.”

He seemed to relax a little at that and he didn’t snatch his hand away, but he still refused to look her in the eye.

“Want to see something amazing?” she offered.

For a long moment, Zuko just stared into his own reflection on the water’s surface, then he nodded ever so slightly.

She was acutely aware she was taking a risk with this - that if the content of his dream was what she thought it was, it might only freak him out all the more - but it was the only thing she could think of to soothe him.

Katara drew a ball of water from the pond and shaped it into an almost one-dimensional sphere. She held it in place in front of her stomach and closed her eyes as she tapped in to her element flowing through her veins, keeping her breaths slow and shallow like the letter had instructed her to. Zuko looked up curiously as she manipulated the water; he always liked watching her bend, particularly when it had some kind of spiritual, medical or artistic purpose. It took a few moments of darkness before she found what she was looking for - the little well of fluid in her abdomen and the spark of life floating in it. 

Zuko wasn’t sure what he was meant to be seeing, until he noticed the water was undulating even though Katara’s fingers were frozen in place, her whole body rigidly still. The disc of water was vibrating, small but regular waves rippling across the surface, a tiny and regular thrumming refusing to let the liquid settle.

_Like a pulse,_ Zuko realised.

“Is that-”

“Yeah.” Katara fought the urge to break form. “That’s the heart. It's been beating for about a fortnight now.”

He was pretty sure his own heart had stopped beating as he shuffled closer to admire the vibrations, so small to the eye but incomprehensibly massive in their meaning. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“Yugoda. I sent her a letter asking if there were any forms I could use to help monitor the pregnancy better. There were.”

“That’s...”

Amazing, fantastic, incredible, wonderful, unbelievable, _terrifying_. 

All those words sprung to his mind as he sat and watched his baby’s heart beating away and yet none of them could quite summarise exactly what he was feeling. There had to be millions of people who had experienced this before him - why hadn’t anyone invented the word? But then he realised - that even with his fancy royal education - he couldn’t do it himself. Language simply didn’t measure up. 

“I was dreaming about my father.” he admitted.

She let the water image drop back into the pond and their baby’s presence was hidden inside her once more. “The Agni Kai?”

Zuko hesitated. “Sort of. It was all the same. Except-” His hands trembled as Katara held them in her lap and though his body felt drained of power, just like when Ty Lee struck his pressure points, all he could see was the flames licking from his fingers. After what he’d just seen, he was half-tempted to summon her right now and get her to try and break his chi permanently. “Except it was me.”

She glanced at his scar. It was always Zuko.

“Not like that.” he said when he saw her look. “It was me challenging. I... I was Ozai and instead of me, it was my... _our_ -”

He couldn’t go on. He didn’t need to.

He pressed the heels of his hands into his temples as he choked out a sob, like he might simply squeeze the image out of his head. He looked awful; skin a deathly pale, frantic eyes sunken into bruised and baggy sockets. He looked _tortured_ \- tortured by a man he hadn’t seen in years and whose remainder of an existence was confined to a six-by-eight concrete box - and she had never hated Ozai more intensely than she did in that moment.

“You would never, Zuko. _Never_.”

“I know. I know, I just-”

She embraced him just in time to catch the pieces as the stress finally broke him apart. It took a pause but eventually he relaxed into her hold defeatedly. He buried his head in the crook of her neck and sobbed, sobbed until he had nothing left in him and the fabric of her nightgown was damp.

“What am I doing?” he sniffed into her shoulder. “You’re the one that’s pregnant. I should be looking after you, not the other way around.”

Katara scoffed at that - like Zuko hadn’t been purposely waking himself up earlier to make sure that he'd be there in the mornings to hold her hair and rub her back when the sickness started, like he hadn't been patiently tolerating her mood swings like the emotional equivalent of a punching bag, like he hadn't been lying awake with her all through the night even when he desperately needed to sleep so he could keep her company, like he hadn't been catering to her every whim and will at any hour no matter how stupid or unreasonable just because he loved her and he wanted to take care of her. Of _them_.

When she was young, she had thought romantic love was only to be found in the intense and sensational - heavy confessions, poetic words, bold actions, a storm of emotions that made her feel like she was balanced on a cliff edge: unpredictable but irresistibly exhilarating - and really, when it was young Zuko she loved, she couldn’t blame herself for thinking that. For every mile she had driven the dramatics, Zuko had matched her and then some. 

But then, somewhere along the line, they’d grown up and Katara had had to face that Zuko’s love came with some serious strings - no, _ropes_ \- attached and if they had any future at all, she had to voluntarily tie herself up in them with him.

Now, they have something more tender, mature and weathered, carved out by years of struggle and compromise and a sheer refusal to let go. She knew that this was far better.

“We look after each other, remember? Idiot.”

Zuko managed a laugh for her as he pulled away. Katara reached up and cradled the scarred side of his face.

Maybe some things didn’t change after all.

They stay like that for a while, nothing but the trickle of the fountain and the murmur of the leaves in the wind to accompany them. Eventually, Zuko calmed. Slowly but surely, a conspicuous amount of weight began to lean more and more into her hand and his lids fluttered. Zuko was strong. He would soldier through practically anything given half the chance - that was why Iroh had stayed so long to try and help manage his self-sacrificial nature - but the sleepless nights were dragging on him now. It wouldn’t be long before his body gave out and forced him into resting, but a total collapse was probably best avoided; the last thing they needed was for rumours to stir that the Fire Lord was sick.

“Come on. Let’s go back to bed.” She stood, putting her hands on her hips. “Who knows, maybe your bratty kid will let me _sleep_ for more than five minutes and I’ll make it through the Council tomorrow without having to lay down on the table.”

“Why is it only _my_ kid when they’re being bratty?” he yawned, stretching his arms above his head.

“Because you’re the one with the brat genes.”

Zuko opened his mouth to contest her but then the first sixteen years of his life came flooding before his eyes in a brutal clarity. 

He turned to sweep one last look around the gardens and an idea sprung into his head. A weak smile tugged at him as he followed her up the stairs.

“Fair enough.”

##  **month 3:**

“Where are we going?”

“I think you’re seriously misunderstanding the whole concept of a surprise, here, Katara.”

Katara grumbled. She _hated_ surprises. Or atleast, she hated them when she was the surprisee, not the surpriser, so naturally, she’d decided to marry Zuko - potentially the most unpredictable man she’d ever crossed paths with.

Zuko had chosen an effective blindfold - the material was so thick that she couldn’t even detect any changes in light as they walked. As he steered her left down yet another corridor, with another few spins on the spot for good measure, her attempt at memorising her steps well and trying to match them to a route she was familiar with truly fell apart. She wasn’t exactly sure how she’d expected her night to take shape when her husband had shown up at her office door, fresh from his solo trip to the Southern Water Tribe, a fire lily in hand along with a proposal to compensate for their missed anniversary plans, but this certainly wasn’t it. 

“ _Zuko_.” she complained.

“Hold on, we’re nearly there.”

He stepped in front of her and carefully guided her down a flight of stairs, across a foyer and down some more shallow steps which she assumed - judging by wave of balmy air that kissed her face - belonged to one of the many porticoes that stood guard at the entrances to the various bits of the palace.

When she took one final step down and grass reached over her sandals to tickle the soles of her feet, she had an idea where he’d taken her.

“Ready?”

She nodded and the cloth fell away from her eyes.

They _were_ in the Fire Lady’s gardens, but not at all as she remembered them.

Aside from the feeling that she was imposing on something that seemed almost sacred to Zuko, Katara had been put off from the gardens by the open corridors that trimmed its perimeter. She couldn’t help but feel like she was being watched when she was in there. Given what she knew about the relationships between her and Zuko’s predecessors, it was probably a purposeful product of design - even on the rare occasions where there had been a kind of affection, trust had never been allowed to fully supplant suspicion.

The invasive walkways were gone now - bricked in as if they were never there at all - and the courtyard was enclosed from view except for the door and the sky above.

The once-uniform flower beds had been torn up and in their places, water channels had been dug into the earth, one on either side, that stretched the full length of the garden. Instead of the usual Fire Nation flora, the troughs had been filled to the brim with aquatic plants from her home and beyond. Lilies of various types sprouted up from the surface, stems swaying under the weight of their blooms - yellows, purples, pinks, blues and oranges twining together into a sea of colour. Budding white lotus flowers floated in their shadows, drifting among dense green blankets of water velvet and clover. Katara recognised some more practical additions to the aesthetic, too - crops of sea stars that her people used to season food, seaweed to make lotions, dragon’s tail to ease swelling, floating hearts to soothe ulcers. Somehow, even some of the delicate blossoms that she’d seen growing around the Spirit Oasis had been coaxed to take root. 

Katara’s stare followed the water beds all the way up to the opposite end of the garden. The delicate white pergola had been pulled down and in its place stood a veranda built from solid grey stone. The walls were adorned with furs and banners while the glassless windows were filled with oil lamps and wind chimes that babbled in the gentle breeze. A round table and chairs sculpted from the same stone as the structure stood in the centre, along with some other furnishings including a pair of benches and some old wooden chests. 

Her eyes wandered down the steps to the fountain that stood just the same as it had before, but now the floor had been dug deeper so the water was more plentiful and in front of it was an elevated circle of rock. A platform for her to practice her bending, she realised. With the flawless shape, the smooth, even surface, and the perfect rendition of the Water Tribe emblem chiselled into the face, she knew instantly that this is what Toph had been doing on her last visit.

“Happy anniversary, Katara.” 

She’d been so consumed by the transformation that she’d forgotten he was there at all. She spun to face him. “But-”

He already knew what she was going to say.

He held up a hand to stop her. “It’s not my mother’s. It never was. It belongs to you. You do so much as Fire Lady, Katara, and now that you’re going to be a mom, too, you need a space that’s just yours; where you can come and have some peace.”

Katara practically leaped at him as she threw her arms around him.

“Thank you.”

“I’m just sorry I didn’t do it years ago.”

He still looked a little apprehensive when she pulled away. “Do you like it?”

“Zuko, I love it. It’s _amazing_.” She turned on the spot again, hardly believing what she was seeing. “Is this why you went South?”

“Partly. Most of the plants I could get imported as seeds but stuff like clover and seagrass is so common in the South it’s not really considered a marketable product, so I had to go and get some samples myself. I did do some statesmanship while I was there, though, so _technically_ I didn’t lie to the Council." he said. “After some intense negotiations and a little trash-talk, your dad and I have decided to renew the accord for another year.”

Katara laughed as they wandered up the path. She had lived in the palace for long enough now that she could call it home without it sounding wrong in her mouth, but the tribe would always be where her roots were. Having a bigger piece of it here meant more to her than she could really verbalise but she was going to give it a shot, until Zuko interrupted her before she even started.

“Come on,” he said, taking her hand and tugging her towards the water’s edge like an eager child. “Let’s go for a swim.”

“In the fountain?”

He nodded.

“ _Naked_?”

He nodded again.

“But we haven’t got any towels.”

Zuko shrugged nonchalantly. “It’s a warm enough night, we can air-dry.”

She looked over her shoulder at the door as Zuko let his thick robes fall to his feet. “What if someone comes in and sees us?”

“I told you, this place is off-limits to everyone unless it’s an emergency and if it _is_ an emergency, then I’m sure someone accidentally seeing our butts would come pretty low on the agenda.” He pulled a look of fake shock. “Are you _scared_ , Katara?”

“No.” she said defiantly.

“Then seize the moment.” he chuckled, pulling his shirt over his head.

Katara’s eyes - like always - were immediately drawn to the star-shaped scar at the base of his sternum. The mark always invoked mixed feelings for her. She loved Zuko for his bravery, for his selflessness, and seeing his scar reminded her of that but she often worried that he was _too_ brave, _too_ selfless. He’d done that for her when she was just a friend and she knew he would do it for others. If that lightning bolt had killed him that day - which, she was uncomfortable to admit, it probably should have - it would have been an honourable end and there were far worse ways to lose someone, but she didn’t want to lose him at all. He had already paid a heavy price for that strike with a heart that stuttered in his chest from time to time - usually provoked by stress but not always. She didn’t care to think how much more he could take.

Fortunately, he didn’t let her dwell on that for too long as he wriggled out of his pants and dived into the water, as bare as the day he was born. After a few seconds, he resurfaced, hair plastered to his face.

“Coming in?” he called.

She caved.

“Fine. I’m not just going to sit around and watch you show off all night.” she huffed.

“That’s the spirit.” he grinned as he ducked beneath the surface again.

Katara kicked off her shoes and unfastened the clasp of her cloak, folding it neatly as she set it down on the grass beside her. While Zuko ducked and dived in the water, she set to work on the intricate buttons that trailed down the right side of her body from her collar all the way down to the skirt. With one last glance over her shoulder to ensure they were alone, she shrugged the material down and stepped out of her dress, leaving her standing there in nothing but her underwear and her bindings.

She chuckled when Zuko drew in a sharp breath behind her back but she accepted the flattery - she wasn’t sure she’d be able to do that when she was nine months in and inflated like an unfortunate bubble fish.

“What? Like something you see?” she hummed in mock seduction as she pulled the tie from her braid and unwound the sections of hair.

She turned when the only answer she got was the erratic chirp of the crickets.

Zuko was completely motionless as he leaned against the fountain wall. He was looking at her, but not _at_ her. Her hands came up to touch her abdomen when she realised that was where his eyes were focused.

“Oh. Oh yeah. This happened while you were away.”

It had appeared overnight, the swell to her stomach. One day nothing, then there the next without any grand announcement. It was small - a slight distension that would easily go unnoticed under a loose fitting dress - but when Zuko put a hand on her, the curve was solid against his touch and it was undeniably a baby bump.

For the first time, he could just about grasp the concept that he was father to a child growing right there under his palm. A child who would bear his blood, his features and whatever legacy he’d managed to carve out for himself when his time was done. A child with its own character, its own likes and dislikes, principles and beliefs, that he would have a hand in shaping. A child that would soon be, if it wasn’t already, the greatest responsibility he could ever hope to have - Fire Lord or not.

Katara desperately wanted to ask what he was thinking but she knew he was thinking a lot of things, that the intensity of the emotions roiling inside him was too much to explain.

So instead, she watched as he caressed his palm to her bump with a kind of reverence she’d never seen.

He took his hand away and replaced it with his head. She dug her fingers into his damp hair as he pressed a cheek to her belly. So lost in the sweetness of it all, Katara didn’t notice as he leaned closer and closer to her, didn’t notice an arm reaching around her waist until suddenly, he’d snatched her over the wall and into the fountain with him.

“ _Zuko!_ ” she spluttered.

The shock had probably caused her to sink the already-low water temperature by several more degrees but Zuko seemed affected by neither the conditions or her outrage as he planted a kiss on her forehead.

“We’re going to have a baby.” he grinned.

“Yeah.” she smiled back as he started to heat the water. “We are.”

##  **month 4:**

“I am sorry, Fire Lord Zuko. I can only imagine how difficult a decision this must be for you, and at such a stressful time with the Fire Lady expecting, but the sort of legislation you’re talking about is truly monumental. It will require a lot of debate, scrutiny and amendment before it’s ready to be passed. If the first draft of the bill is not drawn up within the next month, then there’s a real chance it will not be implemented in time for the birth and that could breed dangerous uncertainty. You do not want there to be doubts about the legitimacy of the heir, or even _who_ the heir is.”

Zuko pinched the bridge of his nose and tried his hardest not to sigh.

He’d had four years to consider how he would change the succession laws to account for the possibility of his firstborn being a waterbender, but still he was no closer to finding the ‘right’ answer.

“What do you think I should do, Madam Qiaoling?”

The chairwoman hesitated. “You have made many positive changes to our country, my Lord, and while things are improving greatly, the Council doesn’t believe that the Fire Nation would be ready to crown a waterbender as Fire Lord, even if you ruled for the rest of your life. Frankly, I agree with that judgement. In my opinion, this is a kind of change that is more evolutionary in nature than sudden; it will take generations.”

“And if I produce no firebenders? Would the people really sacrifice the royal line just to avoid having a waterbender? The blood is supposed to be sacred. Agni knows I think it’s a stupid idea anyway, but what about the divine right to rule?”

“I don’t know, my Lord, but I don't think that scenario is really worth discussing at this point. Yes, Fire Lady Katara is a prodigally strong waterbender and yes, that does have a bearing on the traits inherited by your offspring, but she's also the only waterbender in her immediate family. You, on the other hand, come from a family where firebending has been present in every generation for centuries. Chances are, if you and Fire Lady Katara have several children, you will almost certainly produce a firebender. The question is whether you want primogeniture to mean the firstborn child no matter what or the firstborn _firebending_ child. Absolute primogeniture or bending-preference primogeniture.”

Luckily, there was a gentle knock at the office door before Zuko had to answer that. A familiar face popped around the frame.

“Sorry for the interruption, my Lord, but your Uncle has arrived. He has gone down to the greenhouses.”

“Okay, thank you, Daiju.” he plastered on a smile for his attendant before he turned back to the speaker of his Council. “Come to my chambers tomorrow morning and I’ll have a decision for you.”

Qiaoling didn’t look greatly convinced by her Fire Lord. Zuko could hardly blame the woman for her scepticism. By now, they’d been toing and froing on the succession question for nearly a full month and they had barely any progress to show for it, but the councilwoman took her cue to leave without complaint, bowing her head and gathering up her notes.

Zuko did his best to push the issue of the throne to the back of his mind as he made his way out of the palace, through the gardens and descended the steps into the maze-like structure of the greenhouses. He hadn’t seen his Uncle Iroh in quite some time. Business at The Jasmine Dragon was booming and, now that he knew his beloved nephew had the Fire Lady to look out for his welfare, the old general had truly settled into his life in Ba Sing Se. Zuko didn’t want to spoil their limited time together with his fretting.

“Zuko!” Iroh exclaimed when he saw him in the corner of his eye. “I think I will have to have a word with your gardeners. They are growing your jasmine leaves all wrong.”

“It’s nice to see you, too, Uncle.” Zuko was only somewhat indignant as he approached.

“Jasmine is supposed to grow in mild temperatures, with a plentiful water supply and a nice alkaline soil.” Iroh’s eyes travelled around to the scorching heat lamps above, the low water levels in the irrigation tanks and the bag of acidic soil by his feet. “They are doing the complete opposite. Tea made out of these plants will taste _horrible_.”

“They’re growing it like that on purpose. Katara likes her tea to taste bitter at the moment.” he justified, admiring the delicate white blooms.

The old general’s face softened. “Ah, I see. I did notice you had a particularly large crop. She has been craving teas?”

“Only jasmine and only this specific way. Mostly, she just wants lots of savoury stuff like sourdough, crackers, salted nuts, cheeses, et cetera. She’s been having a few things from home, too. I’ve eaten more sea prunes in the last couple of months than I have in my whole life.”

“They are an acquired taste and hard to import, but I suppose if anyone can fetch sea prunes for a pregnant woman then it’s the Fire Lord.” Iroh chuckled. “How _is_ the Fire Lady getting on?”

“She’s fine. She’s out visiting the schools today, seeing how the new curriculum she helped draw up is working, but she’ll be back for dinner.”

“And the baby?”

Zuko smiled faintly. “Fine, too.”

“Then where are you?” Iroh reached up and tapped the Fire Lord’s forehead when he frowned confusedly. "Your mind is not here with me, it's somewhere else. Would you like to tell me what is distracting you?”

“Yes, actually. I guess I could use your advice.” he sighed. “It’s about the succession.”

“The succession? Surely you are thinking about it _less_ now that you have your first heir on the way.”

“I might not.”

Now it was Iroh who was frowning.

“Fire Nation succession law, as it stands now, has no other requirements other than the order of birth, so the firstborn child of the sovereign is the heir apparent and that’s that. There’s nothing actually _said_ in the law about whether the heir has to be a firebender or not, but the reason that it’s not mentioned is because it’s assumed. The firstborn has always been a firebender because the Fire Lord has only ever married another firebender or a nonbender from a family of firebenders. I... I haven’t done that.” Zuko explained. “I have to assume the chances of my firstborn being a firebender aren't much more than fifty-fifty, not when you factor in the odds of he or she being a waterbender and a nonbender.”

“I don’t care if our children are waterbenders. In fact, I’d actually be kind of relieved if they _were_ waterbenders - less of a chance that they’d take after our side of the family - but the Council says that the Fire Nation would not accept a waterbender on the throne, not even the people that are supportive of my marriage to Katara. I’m not sure if I agree with them or not, but I don’t want to put my kid’s life in danger just to make a moral statement. So I either need to amend the law to specifically state that the heir is the heir regardless of their bending ability, or exclude my waterbending children from the succession entirely.”

“And I have to decide by tomorrow.” Zuko finished weakly.

His uncle was silent. 

“That is quite a problem, Zuko.” Iroh said eventually. He stole a few more moments to chew over his nephew’s predicament before he continued: “I will give you my advice, but know that if you choose to take it, you will have to act on it before you can truly understand the extent of what I’m saying.”

Already true to his uncle’s words, Zuko didn’t understand but he nodded anyway.

“You have been raised to believe that your primary duty in life is to the Fire Nation and to the Fire Nation only, that your wants and needs as a man must come beneath your obligations as Fire Lord.” Iroh’s gaze rested on the five prongs of the crown as it glittered in the afternoon sun, before it sunk down to Zuko’s conflicted eyes. “While that can be true for most things, and it should be, believe me when I tell you that you will not be able to put righteousness, or the good of the country, before what is best for your child. Your son or your daughter will come first in everything, without question, always. You must make this decision on the succession based not on what you believe as Fire Lord, not even as _Zuko_. It’s a decision you must make as a father.” His mournful smile was well-worn as it crossed his face. “If I had thought like that a little more, then perhaps your cousin might still be alive today and you wouldn’t be in this position at all.”

“What happened to Lu Ten wasn’t your fault, Uncle.” Zuko said quickly.

“Yes. It was.” Iroh sighed. “Even at that age, all I wanted in life was to be a great general and to make my father proud. I couldn’t imagine a cost that would be too high for that. If I had been able to see past my own arrogance, if I hadn’t tried to impress my own wants onto my son, I would have sent him far away from the war and he would never have come to Ba Sing Se.”

Iroh put his hand on his shoulder and Zuko could see the raw pain reflected in his uncle’s eyes: “You do not want such a thing on your conscious, Zuko.”

Zuko thought of the feeling that had unfurled his chest when Katara had told him he was going to be a father, how much he loved this baby already even though he hadn’t met them yet. He thought of his cousin, how his existence must have generated that exact same feeling for Iroh. He tried to picture it, his child’s life reduced to nothing more than a memory, a weathered old plaque over a pile of ashes buried deep in the palace’s crypt and an altar that burned for them once a year on their birthday, just like Lu Ten. His brain couldn’t possibly quantify something that huge, that devastating, but the pain that swelled in his heart at just the thought of it made him wonder how his uncle was even still alive, let alone the kind and forgiving soul that he was.

Perhaps the thought that Lu Ten’s death had ultimately served a noble purpose was comfort enough. It had sent his Uncle Iroh down the path to the light, prevented him from ascending to Fire Lord and perpetuating another century of misery and pain, spared his nephew from the same fate and led the world to the better place it was now.

Zuko had already walked his path. He had nowhere else positive to be pushed, nothing else left to find, and he didn’t have his uncle’s strength to help him endure, either. 

Losing his child would simply crush him underfoot. 

* * *

“Katara?”

She glanced up from her crocheting.

Zuko had been off his food and conspicuously taciturn all the way through dinner. That was no small feat when dinner was several courses long and they’d had Uncle Iroh for company. Iroh hadn’t questioned his nephew’s near-silence, nor the brooding grimace he'd worn, so Katara had assumed he would tell her later and did her part to carry the conversation in his stead. But Zuko hadn’t shaken the disquiet off even when they’d come up to the privacy of their rooms and an hour on from bidding his uncle goodnight, he was still sitting on the edge of his desk, turning over the Crown Prince’s headpiece in his hands with a heavy look on his face.

The timing of his coming-back-to-Earth was quite opportune. She was seconds away from snapping at him.

“Would you be upset if I made it so that our waterbender children couldn’t inherit the throne from me?”

Katara dropped her hook and yarn.

She had known something consequential was coming, but not _that_.

Immediately, part of her wanted to say yes - _of course_ she would be upset - because even though she knew Zuko and the majority of their people were firmly against them, there were a few left in the Fire Nation who would take such an act as vindication of their backward beliefs; that fire and its civilisation was the superior force, that low _‘outsiders’_ like her - and potentially her child by extension - had no place in the governing of the nation. She _hated_ that. But even she had to admit that she had not paid much mind to the implications of investing a waterbender as the heir, as the Fire Lord. Up until now, she had subconsciously, _foolishly_ , assumed that this baby would be a firebender purely because it made sense for them to be.

“It would depend on why.” she said slowly.

Zuko set the Prince’s crown on the desk. “The law isn’t specific on the matter because it’s never had to be. I have to get it changed either way. The Council advises that I should make the distinction that only firebenders can inherit, because they believe that the Fire Nation would not tolerate a waterbender as the Fire Lord, even if I stayed on the throne until my death.”

Katara raised her eyebrow dubiously. “The Fire Nation wouldn’t accept a waterbending Fire Lord, or _they_ wouldn’t?”

“Maybe if we were talking about the nobility then I’d agree, but you know that the Council is rational, Katara. Their elected mandate is to pursue what’s best for the Fire Nation as logically as possible and for the most part, they _do_ do that.”

She wanted to laugh. Zuko sticking up for the Council? That was something she thought she’d _never_ hear.

“It sounds to me like you’ve already made your mind up.”

“Hardly. I don’t know what to do. I’m not sure if the Council is right about the people or not. All I’m saying is that I have to take their recommendation seriously.”

Katara wasn’t sure how she was supposed to handle this one. Zuko consulted her on anything and everything that passed his desk - and vice versa - but because of the sheer volume of things on his plate, Zuko had had to overcome his indecisiveness a long time ago. Now, he never came to her without already having his own informed opinion on the subject. Their discussions were always intended to either corroborate his own judgement or change it with reasoning, then figure out the best course of action. She just helped him with decisions - she didn’t take them for him. 

“I don’t think I can help you with this, Zuko.” she sighed.

Zuko looked half-enraged at that admission and finally, she could see just how long this had been playing on his mind.

“Why not? he demanded. “This is your child’s future and they’re your people, too.”

Katara desperately wanted to bite back and start an argument with him. A loud one. This baby was already fraying her nerves. The hormone-induced mood swings hadn’t improved at all even though they were meant to stabilise during the second trimester - if anything they were only getting worse - and she _really_ needed someone to yell at. But the rational part of her spoke up: if she crossed Zuko now, it would be like throwing gasoline onto an inferno and she had just stripped away his last hope of having someone fix this impossible problem for him. He probably had as much a right to be testy right now as she did.

“It is and they are,” she said in a calm, measured tone. “-but I will never completely know what it means to be Fire Nation and I’ll certainly never know what it means to be a firebender, the Crown Prince or the Fire Lord. But you do. You’re the one guy alive who understands all of those things. I trust you to make the right call on this.”

Her words didn’t quite have the soothing effect she’d intended as Zuko snorted sardonically: “Well, I’m glad you do because I don’t.”

She sighed. “What did Uncle Iroh say about it?”

“He said that I should put everything else aside and think just as a father.”

“And? What does your new Dad brain tell you?”

That managed to coax an indistinct smile out of him but it faded almost immediately when he actually got to thinking about the answer to her question.

“I think of what it was like for me when I ascended, before you were here.” he said quietly, his eyes glazed over with memory. “I was... _terrified_. All the time. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. I questioned every decision I made and so did everyone else around me. I was afraid to go anywhere, afraid to talk to people or even look them in the eye. I had to wonder if every knock at the door was someone there to kill me. I was half a monster again by the time things started to settle down - angry and lonely and wounded.” 

“I represented change, I was different, but I wasn’t _too_ far out of the ordinary. I was still the rightful heir by every tradition - the firstborn, a firebender, at the age of majority, and us winning the Agni Kai eliminated any doubt of me not being strong enough to rule. I _fit_ , and they did that to me anyway.”

He slid off the desk and came to perch on the foot stool in front of her, allowing himself to be distracted by Katara’s needlework - what looked to be the beginnings of an intricate blue and white baby blanket.

“I know I shouldn’t bow to pressure.” Zuko continued after a moment. “I know that I should use my power to set an example, to show everyone that bending shouldn’t matter at all, that it’s a person’s character and skill that really counts. And of course, I'd do everything that I could to make it perfect and maybe the Fire Nation _would_ settle with it. Maybe it _would_ be fine. But I think of how it was for me, and I can’t... I can’t even _imagine_ how they might treat a waterbender Fire Lord. And that treatment wouldn't start just when they became the Fire Lord, either. No, it would start from the first time they bent water and that could be... that could be as young as _three_. Every day of their memorable lives until acceptance comes. _If_ it comes." he bowed his head. "How could I consciously risk doing that to my own child?”

Zuko _had_ made his mind up.

“I’m sure this baby would much rather have a father that went to every length to protect them and their happiness than some stupid crown.” she said gently.

He let out a breath and nodded.

“I know what I need to do, but I just can’t help but feel this is a step backward.”

“It’s tough, I get it, but after what you said, Uncle Iroh is right. We have to do what’s best for our family and this is it. This is the right thing. Besides, I’m sure the baby won’t care anyway because if he is a waterbender, he’ll have got the better end of the stick.” she teased as she picked up her crochet hook again. “I’d rather be a waterbender than the Fire Lord.” 

Zuko chuckled as he got to his feet and pressed a kiss to her crown. “Me, too.”

With his head and heart in as close to an agreement as he was ever going to achieve, Zuko allowed himself to forget about the succession and the rest of the night disappeared in much the same way as it usually did. When he woke to the first light of the sunrise though, the weight of what he was about to do immediately returned.

He was making history here - it felt wildly inappropriate for it to be this simple - but Qiaoling would be arriving at any moment, so the Fire Lord sat down at his desk, summoned his courage and picked up his brush.

_“I, Fire Lord Zuko, put forward a bill for amendment to the Act of Succession, relating to the traits required for one to be considered legitimate and therefore eligible for the inheritance of the title of Fire Lord._

_The proposed amendment states that an aspirant would henceforth have to be:_

_a) the eldest living heir of the body of Fire Lord Sozin, following the order as dictated by the Act of Succession_

_b) of sound mind and body_

_c) able to bend the element of fire_ _”_

If there was one thing that Zuko liked about the Council, it had to be that they handled all the specifics of his decisions. Though it would probably take them a scandalous amount of time to do it, they would take his simplistic instruction and from those eight lines the Council would produce a document of an entirely different calibre - ten times the length, worded in such a way that it was completely impervious to creative interpretation and with all the fancy lingo that gave it that irreplicable sense of authority.

With a flourish to his signature and a seal from his ring dipped in ink, it was done and barely a moment later, there was a guard at his door telling him that Chairwoman Qiaoling was here to see him.

If Qiaoling was at all surprised by her Fire Lord’s decision, she didn’t show it. She simply bowed his head with an _“as you wish, my Lord”_ and she was gone.

Zuko had no idea what he had just set into motion, what consequences it could have tomorrow, next week, next year, or even in a hundred years, but he knew that what he’d done would keep his child safe from one more thing.

That would have to be enough for today.

##  **month 5:**

Zuko had thought himself an expert on frustration.

Out of all the emotions he’d felt as a boy, that had to be the most recurrent.

As a child, almost all of it had been provoked by his sister. Watching Azula excel at the forms he’d been working on for months without success in one attempt. Staying quiet as she'd spouted off all the things she’d learnt from their tutors while his hours poring over the books were mostly fruitless. Seething as she'd pranced and preened for Azulon, for Ozai, with so little effort but still soaked up all of their praise and favour like he didn’t even exist. He couldn’t say that things had entirely changed now they were adults, either. He still felt that same prickle of irritation, that same acidic jealousy in his gut, when he watched her bend her lightning like it was the easiest thing in the world when he couldn’t even manage a spark.

It was after the Agni Kai, during his banishment that his frustration had manifested into a near constant presence. 

Somewhere deep down, he’d known all along that the task he’d been charged with was meant to be impossible to fulfil but still he’d tried. Weeks - sometimes even months - floating in the blue-grey doldrums of the open ocean without even a whisper of the Avatar to follow. Then something with just enough promise that it was only a little laughable would come along and he’d chase down the ‘lead’ till in inevitably ended in nothing and he was back to square one, over and over until suddenly three years had gone by. Then, when he’d actually somehow _found_ what he was looking for, it had only gotten worse. Coming so close, close enough that he could touch it, but falling short every time.

When he’d finally joined the group at the Air Temple, he hadn’t been consoled much. If anything, the feeling had only been exacerbated when he’d seen just how chaotic and disorganised and out of focus they were and he could only wonder how they’d managed to evade him for so long.

None of that compared to what he was going through now, though.

Everything had seemed to be settling down. Katara was well into her second trimester, the worst of her symptoms had finally tapered off, the rapturous clamour around the pregnancy news had died down a little, Zuko was getting used to seeing his wife with her bump. Harmony - or the nearest thing to it - had been restored to the palace. Then suddenly, on an otherwise perfectly ordinary day, the fourth in the first week of her fifth month, Katara had shattered her glass on the floor because she’d felt something quicken within her and yet again, Zuko’s world was flipped on its axis.

From there, the indistinct flutters had been quick to develop into pronounced kicks and punches and rolls and jabs and all other forms of acrobatics.

Or atleast that’s what Katara tells him, because he couldn’t feel a damn thing.

Zuko had never wanted anything more than he wanted to partake in those quiet moments she shared with their child, sitting in the silence and feeling every one of those precious little movements.

“He’s not strong enough yet.” Katara explained. “Give him some time.”

Three weeks had passed.

Nothing had happened for him.

It had been a very long morning. Despite Zuko’s best attempts to get them to table it for a later date (one that he would make certain he wasn’t present for), the Council was still hung up on what was, at best, a menial dispute between two fishing communities to the north of the country. He’d been about ready to simply explode when the midday recess had been called and, as he sat and watched Katara follow their baby’s motions across the table, already irritated by the proceedings, Zuko decided he was going to feel particularly bitter about it today.

“The baby’s moving.” Katara smiled.

“I don’t want to know.” he said sourly, taking a vicious bite out of his sandwich.

In spite of the early start that would usually set her off on a bad foot, Katara was unaffected by the Council’s obsession with the fishing affair. She seemed to like - even _enjoy_ \- handling the more local issues, no matter how petty.

Speaking of petty, she just laughed at his surliness, patting the growing curve of her belly as she told them: “Your dad is getting annoyed with you.”

Katara had started talking to their baby pretty much the same day she’d found out they were there. Initially, Zuko had found the whole thing a little disconcerting - even more so when she had begun to encourage him to do the same - but when she’d explained to him why it was necessary, that the baby might come to find his voice a comfort when they were born, his shyness seemed entirely unimportant. Now, he probably enjoyed talking to his unborn child more than he did most people.

“I’m not annoyed. I’m just... disappointed.”

“Wow, you’re really getting in early on the whole discipline thing, huh?” she smirked as she scraped her bowl for the last of rice pudding she’d liberally seasoned with fire flakes. Unlike most of her other symptoms, the outrageous cravings had yet to leave her. “ _‘I’m not angry, just disappointed’_ has got to be the oldest one in the book. Have you been reading up?”

He hadn’t.

In fact, Zuko hadn’t even _considered_ that he was going to have to scold this child (only from time to time, hopefully). He was good at being authoritative as Fire Lord - exercising his command over people that felt obliged to do his bidding anyway - but in the personal sphere? Not so much. Katara was the boss. 

If he could have told teenage Zuko that in ten years, his biggest worry would be how he was going to discipline a kid, _his_ kid, he’d never have believed it.

Zuko had to wonder if there was some unrecognised branch of waterbending that involved mind-reading when Katara said: “Don’t worry, I’m sure something a little more dire will come up for you to stress about soon enough.”

“Sooner than you think.” he answered, pushing the Council’s agenda sheet across the table to her. “A read of the succession amendment is next.”

She frowned as she read down the page. “You don’t really think they’ll hold you up on it? It was _their_ recommendation.”

“No, but the legislation needs to be absolutely perfect, since it concerns the fate of, you know, the _whole_ country. That’s why I had to make a decision so fast. It’s going to need a lot of inspection and changes before it’s ready for declaration, and they'll probably be disagreements about the provisions should be.”

Katara wrinkled her nose. While Zuko excelled at the technical side of things, she was better at the human level. It was probably a good system - two halves of one ruler - but occasionally, they did have to sit in on each other’s domains. Zuko had already endured the trials of the morning. Now it was her turn.

“Joy.”

She reached for a plate of the sickly-looking pudding the kitchen had brought for her as a last hurrah - the baby had mostly moved on from the savoury tastes that had characterised the earlier months and had now developed a rather impressive sweet tooth - but she was interrupted by the tame chimes of a bell from down the hall. The one that summoned the Council back in for the next session.

Zuko offered her a hand and a sympathetic look as she got up from the table.

Since this was already the second or third reading of the bill, the Council were mercifully quick to find their stride once they’d settled into their seats. They were also at a stage where thankfully, only a cursory input would be required from Zuko and even less from her; most of the dialogue would be exclusively between the councillors while Chairwoman Qiaoling was responsible for setting the topics and managing the time as per the schedule. All they needed to do was dictate their wishes to act as the boundaries of the debate.

As the councillors discussed amongst themselves, Zuko let his hand lazily drift across to rest on Katara’s abdomen.

They were somewhere in a wrangle over what powers should be included under Katara’s hypothetical regency when he felt it.

_Kick._

For a second, he wondered if he’d imagined it. The world around him seemed perfectly normal as Katara stared at the opposite wall absently and the Council continued to talk about ‘Clause B of Section 2′. Then he felt it again.

_Kick. Kick._

There no mistaking what was tapping away at him.

Maybe he’d made a noise, pressed his hand in a little harder or maybe it was just divine intervention, but Katara looked over at him and she knew, because there was only a very limited number of things on their Earth that could humble Zuko like that.

“Fire Lord Zuko?” 

The councilwoman on his immediate right - Leikela, he remembered, the regional representative from the Western province - spoke up and from the way she was looking at him, he sensed he’d ignored a question. Maybe two. “Can this wait until another day?”

“Uh, yes, actually. It can.” he said. He was surprised by the confidence in his own voice and clearly the councilwoman was, too. She’d provided an opportunity for him to extend an apology for his lapse in concentration, for the Council to graciously accept and for business to move on as usual. She hadn’t been expecting him to take her up on the rhetorical offer. “The Council is adjourned until next session. You’re dismissed. You can show yourselves out.”

The rest of the Council hadn’t been expecting that, either.

Thirty-one pair of eyes blinked at him and at each other, utterly dumbfounded. The moment of shock stretched on, until finally Qiaoling took the initiative and did as her Fire Lord asked. Gradually, the rest of the councillors followed the example of their chairwoman and filed out of the room one-by-one until finally they were alone.

The second the door banged shut, Zuko was out of his chair and on his knees in front of Katara.

“You did not just send away the Council because of this.”

“I did.”

She unlaced the outer layer of her robes and his hands roamed over the round of her belly, searching for any sign of activity. It wasn’t too long before he was rewarded for his brazenness.

“There you are.” he breathed as the baby rolled beneath his palms.

“Happy now?” she smiled as she watched him revel in the feeling.

Zuko didn’t even bother to nod an answer.

She knew that he was.

##  **month 6:**

Katara, in every sense possible, was a tribeswoman.

The South Pole would always be where her heart called home but although she missed the ice and snow most days, there were plenty of things about the Fire Nation she did love.

She loved the bright colours of the flowers, the bird song at dawn, the exotic vibrancy and variety of the markets, the constant energy that hummed in the air wherever she went. In time, she had even come to love the people - their pride, their creativity, their inquisitiveness, their diligence, and above all, their loyalty.

But perhaps the thing she treasured most about the Fire Nation (other than her husband, of course) was the scenery.

When she had peeked out over the village wall as a girl, all there was to see was a barren white wasteland. Beautiful in some ways - its harshness and danger a kind of awe-inspiring - but rather uneventful to look at. The opposite was true here, in the view from the Fire Lord’s chambers. She dreaded to think how many hours she had frittered away curled up on the seat beneath the bay windows; watching a medley of different people milling about their lives below, admiring the crystal-like shimmer of the crater lake in the sun, staring up at the jagged peaks of the volcano’s shell that towered over them like mountains and the vivid blue sky that stood above them.

Today, atleast, her watching of the world beyond the glass had its purpose.

Sure enough, she spotted a flurry of activity around the gates at the bottom of the courtyard. Right on time.

It was a rare event for Ursa and Ikem to come to them at the palace, rarer still for them to be staying the night, too. The past was unpleasant and almost all of it was trapped within these walls. While she and Zuko had made the place their own, replacing the bad memories with better ones, Ursa couldn’t do the same. They understood why. In fact, the arrangement actually had some benefits in that having to go to Hira’a to visit provided an excellent excuse for her and Zuko to get away for a few days. This time, though, they’d made an exception and Katara was grateful for it - the summer was already hotting up and the idea of trekking halfway across the country, six months pregnant, wasn’t at all appealing.

“They’re here.” she called over to Zuko.

Zuko glanced up from his desk with the overwrought look she was used to seeing by now.

She wasn’t sure if it was because of the infrequency of her visits lent a sense of enormity, or if he’d be the same way if he saw her every day, but Zuko was always on edge in the moments leading up to seeing his mother. In some ways, it was entirely baseless - every visit went as well as it could - but Katara knew the irreparable turmoil that Ursa presented for him.

“It’s going to be fine.”

“I know.”

“And your sister is here, too.”

“I know.”

Still, the apprehension lingered in his expression and his frame as he stood from his work desk and met her by the door. 

She linked her arm with his and squeezed tightly. “I’m here.” 

“I know.” he said again, but there was a light smile and he squeezed back.

Zuko did an impressive job of fitting the worst of his feelings back into his mental lock-up as they made their way down to the courtyard. By the time they got down to the front steps and ran straight into his stepfather, he looked about as ordinary as he usually did, though Katara could still feel the undercurrent of tension radiating from him.

“Whoa, get a load of the Fire Lady.” Ikem grinned broadly as he looked her up and down. “You’re glowing, Katara.”

Zuko agreed firmly with his stepfather. Not that Katara wasn’t beautiful normally, but there was something extra special about her nowadays. Pregnancy made her shine like the Sun. Her hair had somehow grown even thicker and glossier than it was before. Her skin was clear, her eyes bright and of course, there was her bump. At six and a half months along, it was full and prominent now and, despite her jokes and complaints, Zuko knew how proud she was of it - the tangible proof that she was creating life inside her. He loved it, too. He wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to handle the intense, overwhelming joy he felt when he saw her with it and really, he didn’t want to.

“ _Fattening_ , is what I am.” Katara smoothed her hand over the swell of her belly affectionately. “I’m going to be as big as a hippo cow once this kid is ready to come out.”

“I like hippo cows.” Kiyi offered as she appeared from behind her father.

“Thanks, Kiyi. It’s nice to see you.” Katara laughed, giving the ten-year-old a hug as tightly as she could manage.

Zuko craned his neck in search of his mother before Ikem explained: “She’s just getting something taken out of our carriage. She should be along now.”

Soon enough, the Lady Mother (Zuko had changed the title to that. Ursa thought Fire Mother sounded a little _too_ godly for her liking) appeared around the corner, the servants dragging a large box off up the hall behind her.

“Hello, Zuko.” she greeted warmly. She stood up on her toes to kiss his cheek lightly.

It had been seven years since they were reunited, seven years of having her with him, but still Zuko wondered if there would ever be a time when he was used to seeing his mother again. He wondered if his feelings would ever be anything other than mixed when he saw her, if he would ever be able to put aside the razor-sharp underside to his love for her that still screamed _‘she loved you and she saved your life, but then she left you to suffer. She forgot you like you were worth nothing at all because her feelings were more important than your memory’._

It had felt almost criminal approaching Katara with his doubts - like she wouldn’t kill to have this opportunity with Kya - so he didn’t. He let it eat away at him, bit by bit, until finally Katara had forced him to tell her the truth.

_“You don’t always have to forgive people when they hurt you, Zuko. You taught me that, remember?”_

_“She’s my mother. How am I supposed to have a relationship with her if I don’t forgive her?”_

_“Do you want to cut off contact, then?”  
_

_“No!”  
_

_“Then you love her more than the things she did. You can live with it. Let her know how you feel, otherwise it’ll just fester and turn into something else entirely, but let the bits of you that love her carry on.”_

Now, it was Katara who understood Ursa a little less.

Katara had always given Ursa the benefit of the doubt and encouraged Zuko to do the same. They didn’t know what it was to be a parent, let alone in circumstances such as Ursa’s, so who were they to judge? But now, seven years later, she was a mother and Zuko a father. In spite of his conflicting emotions, Zuko’s journey towards parenthood had actually made him want to get closer to Ursa, seeking her advice and comfort in the place of his father. It had done the opposite for her. 

Katara knew that she would die before she let anything like what had happened to Zuko happen to their child, and she certainly would never choose to forget them to spare her own feelings.

In the end, the Fire Lady had to take her own advice. 

She didn’t understand Ursa’s actions. She never would, but she was still Zuko’s mom and she had come to respect her - even love her - in her own way regardless.

“Katara.” Ursa opened her arms for a hug which Katara accepted. Zuko felt a familiar pang of sadness as he watched them embrace, guilty that Katara couldn’t have her own mother to be there to guide her through her first pregnancy. 

“How are you feeling, dear?” Ursa asked when they parted, gently putting a hand on Katara’s stomach after she nodded her consent.

“Not too bad.” she sighed. “Just tired.”

The expectant grandma raised an eyebrow. “Is my grandchild giving you trouble?”

“At the start, all I wanted was for him to move. Now, he won’t _stop_ moving.”

“Ah, so she takes after her father and Auntie Kiyi then.” Ursa looked between her eldest and her youngest with an almost yearning expression. “Zuko kicked a lot when I carried him, every hour of every day. It was like he wanted my attention all of the time.” She leaned in to give Katara a conspiratorial, not-at-all-quiet, whisper. “Not much changed after he was born, either.”

_You’re twenty-six years old, a father-to-be and the Fire Lord; you can’t be embarrassed by your mom anymore,_ he berated himself but still he could feel a prickling heat in his cheeks.

“ _Mom_.” 

The two women tittered before Ursa patted her daughter-in-law’s arm sympathetically. “When I carried my babies, they liked it when I sang. It would get them to sleep right away. Maybe your baby would like it, too.” 

Katara blinked, clearly surprised that she hadn’t thought to try a lullaby - or at the implication that Azula had once enjoyed something as trivial as her mother’s singing. Either way, Zuko took advantage of the silence to temporarily waylay any more of his baby stories from coming out and manoeuvred his family out of the palace and into the main gardens, where the kitchen had prepared a lunch for them.

They went through the motions of catch-up. Zuko asked Ikem how his acting was going. Ikem asked Zuko how his Fire Lording was going. They gave it their best shot, but neither of them really knew how to respond to the other’s answer. Ursa and Katara talked about healing, seeking each other’s advice on a particular ailment or sharing something new they’d learned. Ursa asked after her former brother-in-law, to which Zuko explained that he was doing a stint at the Jasmine Dragon before his great-nephew or niece arrived (Zuko had yet to ask him if he wanted to be Grandpa Iroh, not Great-Uncle Iroh. Come to think of it, he hadn’t clarified anything with Ikem on that front either). They talked about the baby - how Katara’s second trimester was going (great), a little back-and-forth about names (not a lot - he and Katara had yet to discuss it themselves), and inevitably some more stories from Zuko’s childhood came out (luckily not all of them were crushingly humiliating). But, as always, Kiyi carried the conversation most, chattering a mile-a-minute about her school, her friends, her dance classes, her new pet badger frog (aptly named Hopper).

Zuko was somewhere in the middle of hearing about another dress his sister had acquired, vaguely wondering if his and Katara’s child would talk as much as its aunt, when the guard watching them came over and tapped the Fire Lady’s shoulder.

“Sorry to interrupt, Lady Katara, but your head of staff would like to discuss the arrangements for your trip to Ember Island. It’ll just take a second, she said.”

“Alright. I’m coming.” She set her teacup down on the table with an apologetic smile to Ursa and Ikem, then followed the soldier over to the pergola where her personal assistant, Miss Amida, stood waiting.

Kiyi looked up to her mother hopefully. “Are we going to Ember Island, too?”

“No, sweetie. Katara and Zuko would like to go alone this time.”

He frowned. Aside from the three weeks they’d spent there after their wedding, he and Katara had never been to Ember Island by themselves. Ember Island was an opportunity that very rarely presented itself in their day-to-day lives: having enough time to spend with their loved ones. So they invited everyone - Sokka and Suki, Aang and Toph, Uncle Iroh, Ursa, Ikem and Kiyi, Hakoda. One time even Gran Gran and Pakku had ventured out of the South Pole to come to the island with them. What with everyone being adults now (except Kiyi, of course), all with responsibilities of some kind to bear on their shoulders, they hardly ever had a hundred percent of their family there, but there were always enough for it to be a communal affair.

He opened his mouth to refute his mother but then, suddenly, he realised what she was getting at. By next summer, the baby would be here. 

This was the last chance that he was going to get to spend a prolonged amount of time alone with Katara for... well, atleast the next eighteen years of their lives. Probably more if they set the clock back with another baby or two along the way.

Kiyi, unfortunately, was still too young to catch on to the subtlety. “But _Mom_ -”

“Hey, Kiyi,” Katara called out, the queries of her personal assistant satisfied. “Do you want to come and feel the baby? He’s moving a lot today.”

Her face lit up. “Yeah!”

Ursa laughed as her daughter scampered over the grass lawns, up the steps of the decking and leaped onto the bench next to her sister-in-law, the possibility of Ember Island all forgotten about.

“Well, Katara sure knows what’s she doing.” she chuckled. “She’s going to make a great mom.”

“She is.”

Katara took his little sister’s hands into her own and placed them strategically on her abdomen. For a moment, nothing happened but then a grin burst onto Kiyi’s face and she giggled, saying that it felt strange. As she was moving her palms to follow the movements, Zuko was certain that he saw the baby strike out hard enough to make Katara’s belly jump. Kiyi squealed in astonishment and Katara confirmed it for him when looked up, an expression of total awe on her face. They shared a smile before she turned her attention back to Kiyi.

Zuko had spent most of the month prior in a tailspin about not being able to feel his child move at all. Now, in just a few short weeks, she was strong enough that he could see her kick from the outside.

He shook his head disbelievingly. 

“So is the baby a boy or a girl?” he heard Kiyi ask.

“We don’t know, but we thought that calling the baby ‘it’ didn't sound very nice, so I say he because I think it’s a boy and Zuko says she because he thinks it’s a girl.”

Suddenly, just as Kiyi launched herself headfirst into a discussion of the pros and cons of either sex ( _“I want it to be a girl. Girls are so much better than boys and then I can play dolls and dresses with her when she gets big._ ”), Zuko found himself picturing another scenario in his head. Everything was the same but instead of Kiyi sat beside Katara, it was that little girl from the South Pole. Or rather, the girl that he pictured to be their daughter. Kya. All brown curls and shining eyes that matched her long, blue dress. The two flames of the Crown Prince’s coronet sat atop her head as she swung her legs and pressed her little hands to her mother’s swollen belly, trying to feel her new baby brother or sister kick.

_Don’t get ahead of yourself, Zuko,_ he told himself sternly - it had taken them four years to get to this point, who knows how long it would take for them to get round to doing it again - but he was already so deep in that image that he flinched when Ursa slipped her hand into his and pulled him away from it.

“Come with me. There’s something I’d like to show you.”

Zuko let his mother lead him away from the gardens. He was so distracted by the image of his phantom daughter, the possibility of a second child, that he didn’t even realise where she was taking him until they were already there.

The royal nursery had been stripped bare of most of its furnishings a long time ago. In fact, the only thing that was left in there that would even identify it as a nursery was the old rocking chair, abandoned in the corner and blanketed with dust. It was probably going to stay that way for a while longer, too. The nursery suite was too far away from the Fire Lord’s chambers. The palace was built to be that way. None of their predecessors would have wanted to hear a screaming baby at night, much less tend to one, because there would have been a nanny in the adjoining room to soothe the child for them. Even Zuko had had a woman other than his mother to nurse him.

That wasn’t how Zuko planned on rearing his own child, not that Katara would ever allow it. The only people that would be taking care of this baby would be its parents, so this room was functionally useless to them, atleast until the baby was older and could be counted on to sleep through the night.

But, of course, Ursa wasn’t to know that so this was where she’d sent the mysterious object from earlier.

Ursa looked around the room, clearly puzzled at its neglected condition, but she seemed to think better of commenting on it and simply nodded at the box that the staff had left in the centre of the floor. “Go on.” 

“Don't you think I’m a little old for surprises?" he chuckled as he lifted the tails of his robe and knelt down on the grimy floor.

“Technically, it’s not for you so I think it’s allowed.”

Zuko opened the lid of the box curiously. Inside was a collection of shapes carved from dark ebony wood - one long rectangle piece; two squares with a oval-shaped arch on top, one slightly bigger than the other; four short bits that Zuko assumed were the legs. It was too jumbled for him to figure out what the pieces were supposed to make, so he reached in and lifted up the larger square. He skimmed his hand over the surface, polished and shiny, just as he spotted in the box what appeared to be a pair of barred panels.

A crib, he realised. He was holding the headboard of a crib.

“You mentioned in your last letter about finding the cot that you and your sister slept in when you were babies, but it’s gone.” she sighed. “Your father got rid of it once Azula was old enough for a proper bed and I made it clear that we wouldn’t be having any more children. Even then, he wasn’t much the sentimental type. So I thought maybe you’d like a replica instead.” she brightened. “It's made of the same type of tree from the same forest, was crafted by the same carpenter. It's almost identical to the original, except for one small detail.”

Ursa gestured for him to turn the headboard over and there, etched into the arch, were two circular symbols - the Water Tribe’s moon and sea, the Fire Nation’s flame beneath it.

“Mom.” He made a doomed effort to swallow the lump crushing his throat, as he brushed his thumb over the carvings. “Thank you. This is... _perfect_.”

He went straight to her arms when she opened them to him.

“I’m so happy for you, Zuko.” she murmured as she held him. “You have everything I ever wanted for you. Friends who support you, a family who loves you, a wife who _adores_ you and now a baby, too. You deserve all of this. You will make a wonderful father.” Ursa smiled up at him before a shadow of sorrow surfaced. “I just hope I can be a better grandma than I was a mom.”

She touched a finger to his lips when he tried to speak. 

“You don’t have to say anything. I don’t want you to. I know I did a lot of things wrong by you, Zuko, by Azula, and it can’t ever be undone but I’m trying.”

“I’m trying, too.” he tells her quietly. “Mom, you know... you know that I love you, right?”

The utter relief on her face at hearing something that should flow so naturally between a mother and son - a statement that shouldn’t really even need to be said aloud - made Zuko’s heart sick.

She echoed his words gratefully and buried her face into his chest.

Zuko closed his eyes and begged to any benevolent spirit that was listening that his child would never have to find the love of a parent so hard to live with.

##  **month 7:**

Zuko felt like he had only just slipped off into the soft, hazy darkness of sleep when he was jolted awake by a loud cry.

At first, he thought he’d dreamt it, or maybe it was just something outside. It was a palace after all and it was noisy. Hundreds of people - their immense host of staff and the rotation of visitors that ensured the guest suites were always in a near constant state of occupancy - lived here with them at any given time, and then there was a capital city constantly buzzing with activity beyond the walls. He was a light sleeper. He did get woken up sometimes.

But then he rolled onto his back and saw Katara sat up beside him, staring down at the mattress, her silhouette illuminated by the moon.

“Katara?” he called out hesitantly.

“Zuko, something’s wrong. The-, the _baby_.” 

He bolted upright and he immediately saw the shadow spreading from between her legs. Almost instinctively, a flame flared to life in his palm and the shadow turned bright red. It was everywhere - on the mattress, on her nightgown, smeared on her inner thighs and staining her fingertips.

He was out of the bed and falling towards the door before he even realised it, but it still didn’t seem fast enough. 

The pair of guards outside had heard the commotion and were preparing to bust into the room, swords drawn in one hand and fire blazing in the other, when their Fire Lord crashed into the hallway.

Zuko almost wished that he was in the middle of an assassination attempt. The poor guards probably would have understood that a lot better.

He wasted ten precious seconds yelling at their confused faces to go and get the doctor.

In his usual state of mind, he probably would have marvelled at just how fast Maho managed to get to them - she lived on the other side of the palace and she often went out during the night to help at the city's clinics - but to him, it felt like a century. The seconds had seemed like days, minutes like years, as he’d clutched Katara to his chest and murmured to her that it was fine, they were fine, that everything was going to be _fine_ , while she howled and more and more of her blood spilled out onto the sheets. Their baby was slipping away right in front of him and he was helpless.

When help finally did arrive, Doctor Maho prised Katara out of his arms and suddenly he was being herded back through the door by an intern, telling him gently but firmly that they needed space and calm to help the Fire Lady.

Before he even knew it, Zuko was out in the corridor. 

He touched his hand to the damp spot on the thigh of his pants and it came away red. 

His legs folded beneath him.

As he sat there against the wall, alone in the dark, and listened to Katara’s wails, Zuko felt something inside him shatter irreparably.

* * *

Katara had to explain it to him four times before he stopped feeling like he was going to throw up. 

“Part of the placenta has detached from the wall of my uterus.” she said calmly.

It sounded simple, innocuous even, when she put it like that but all Zuko could think about was the blood.

“How are you so _calm_?”

“It’s only a mild abruption.” she answered tersely. Her voice was so collected, so _hollow_ , that he wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her into a bigger reaction. “The bleeding has stopped. I’m not having any preterm contractions. It looks like the baby is still getting enough of the oxygen and nutrients that he needs to keep growing. Now I just have to take it easy and try to make sure that it doesn’t tear anymore or at worst, detach completely.”

“And what if it does? Detach completely?”

Katara stared up at him like she was considering not answering that question, but she didn’t doubt that he would chase down the physician and ask her instead, if need be. She didn’t doubt that Maho would tell him the truth.

“The baby wouldn’t be able to breathe,” Katara swallowed. “So they’d have to do a surgical delivery as soon as possible.”

“Cut you open.” Zuko stated. He was fast getting sick of all the medical jargon that he’d probably understand if his brain would stop going hay-wire for a second and he actually put some thought into it but he just _couldn’t_. All he saw was red.

“Yes. They’d take him out. If it were to happen now, he’d be small, vulnerable, but he'd have a chance of survival. Then they’d have to try and staunch the bleeding.”

_Try_ , Zuko thought, _they’d try._

Zuko had been trying his whole life. He knew better than anybody that try didn’t always equal succeed.

His heart was pounding so hard in his chest that he thought it might break through his ribs as she sat there in their bed, the bloodied sheets taken away and replaced with fresh white ones, hands folded in her lap like she was talking him through how to put up a tent or something.

“You could die.” Tears pricked his eyes. “The baby, too.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” Katara finally yelled, something truly savage in her eyes when she snapped her head up to glare at him. “You want to know why I’m so calm? Because there’s nothing, _nothing_ , I can do about any of this! All I can do is lay here like an invalid, cross my fingers and pray to any fucking god that’s listening to be merciful. All the people I’ve helped in my life, all the people I’ve _saved,_ and the only people that I can’t save is myself and my child.” she choked out a caustic laugh. “I can’t do anything to make sure that my own baby doesn’t end up suffocating to death inside me. I can’t do anything to make sure that, even if he does live, that he won’t have to grow up just like me: with a dead mother and a grieving father on his conscience.”

Suddenly, he understood.

Katara had only been this powerless at one other time in her life - when death had been looming over her mother and her only option was to run away. Now, the roles of that horrible, fateful night had been reversed and she wasn’t even sure that her body would allow her to do the one thing that her mother had:

Protect her baby.

“I’m sorry.” he hauled in a breath. “Katara, I’m so sorry.”

She just shook her head but then the tears began to fall.

Zuko sat the end of the bed in front of her and reached out. She struggled for a moment as he tried to pull her close - fists half-heartedly thumping against his chest - but slowly but surely, he convinced her to let him hold on to her. She folded into him like she’d been holding up the entire world and sobs racked her frame as Katara - fierce, brave, indomitable Katara - came apart at the seams.

She tried to make herself stop. She knew rationally that letting her distress take the reins wasn’t helping her already-fragile pregnancy. 

She tried to let his reassurances hit home, to ignore the fact that however well-meaning they were, they were still empty. There was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone could do. It was out of their hands. A penny in the air.

But even when she finally allowed Zuko’s voice and Zuko’s hand stroking her hair to soothe her, when she let the darkness come in to take her, she was still whimpering in her sleep.

##  **month 8:**

“Zuko?”

“Mm?” Zuko answered vacantly. His mind was too deeply focused on the tax proposals in front of him to muster anything more than a hum of acknowledgement. 

He took a moment to wish - not for the first time in his reign as Fire Lord - that his Uncle had spent a little less time on the tea-making and meditation lessons and a little more on economics and revenue law. Then again, he thought, what would he have used that kind of expertise on if he’d stayed in exile, an outcome that his Uncle had to have prepared for over the years? It might have been helpful in running the Jasmine Dragon, he supposed. He could have handled the finances, if he’d lived out the rest of his days as a humble tea-boy in Ba Sing Se and not the leader of a whole country.

“Where is this baby going to sleep?”

He looked up at Katara for the first time in a couple of hours. She’d pushed off the blankets he’d insisted on laying over her earlier - _“It’s the middle of the summer, Zuko, I don’t need any blankets at all, let alone extra” “The nights have a chill, okay?”_ \- and lifted her shirt. Her hands were pressed on either side of her bare bump and her eyes were wide.

“What?” he blinked tiredly, setting down his ink brush.

“Where is this baby going to sleep?” she repeated insistently. “There’s no nursery.”

Zuko opened his mouth to say _‘Of course there’s a nursery, Katara. The baby will sleep in there’_ and happily spend the rest of his night in peace, amusing himself at the thought of Katara - master waterbender, chief’s daughter and Fire Lady - having baby brain. 

Until he had the horrible realisation that she was right.

When he had first found out that Katara was pregnant, and after the shock had worn off, Zuko had been bursting to go and share the news with anyone and everyone he came across, but she had taken his hands and carefully explained to him just how early, how fragile, it was. Katara had been truly afraid of losing the tiny little life they’d created together and, once the prospect had been put to him, so was Zuko. If the worst had happened, it would hardly have been an experience that they wanted to share with the whole world, so Katara told her Gran Gran (at first, she’d wanted to tell Sokka, but then she realised he’d be incapable of staying silent), Zuko told Uncle Iroh, both were sworn to secrecy and that was that. No one else was to know, so acquiring anything for a nursery was an impossibility.

The weeks dragged by. They both went about their business like they were walking on eggshells, but eventually they passed that critical point and - except for Katara arousing their maid’s suspicions by getting vomit on their bedsheets a few times - Katara reached her thirteenth week without a hitch. 

After having to keep quiet for so long, they’d spent all of the second trimester basking in the glory of being expectant parents. Everything had been so joyous - sharing their happiness with their family and friends, telling the Fire Nation that they were finally getting a prince or princess, allowing themselves to get attached to their baby. He guessed they’d been too distracted by all that to consider doing the material preparation just yet.

But then the abruption had happened and since then, putting together a nursery had been the furthest thing from either of their minds, their every waking moment consumed with the need to do everything they could to make sure that their baby were safe.

Zuko didn’t want to get complacent or tempt fate, but things were... _okay_ now. Those first few days had been impossibly tough, like waiting for a bomb to drop on their heads, but Katara had done all she could - spent her days in between the bed and her armchair by the window - and gradually a month had passed. In that time, the baby had kept growing, kept kicking at her mother to let them know that she was just fine, and the likelihood of Katara holding on till the natural end of her pregnancy seemed high. With that likelihood had returned the need for them to get their lives in as much order as possible, but somehow they’d forgotten to do the most basic thing required of them.

Right now, Zuko almost wished he _was_ a humble tea-boy in Ba Sing Se and not a grown man who had failed to prepare _anything_ for his unborn child.

His unborn child, he remembered, that was due to be born in just eight short weeks.

“Oh _shit_.”

Katara just chuckled. 

“Sorry, kid. In all the drama you caused, Mommy and Daddy completely forgot that you actually needsomewhere to live.” she said to her belly.

Zuko pushed up from his desk and immediately began to pace up and down on what Katara called his slip’n’slide, the bit of the room where he tended to pace so fast that it reminded her of someone skidding along a stretch of ice.

“It’s alright, Zuko. It’s not that big of a deal.”

He stopped in his tracks and turned to her so suddenly she was surprised he didn’t trip. “Of course it is! She could be here anytime now!”

She rolled her eyes. A big part of her wished she hadn’t said anything at all. It would probably have been far easier to arrange for someone else to handle the nursery than it would be to get Zuko past his stressing out phase and into actually doing something about it.

“Don’t be so _dramatic_. I have two months to go and even if he does decide to come a little early, we should still have atleast four weeks from now to work with. Besides, it’s not like we’ll actually be _using_ the nursery right away. He’ll be sleeping in here with us for the first six months, maybe longer, so I can feed him easily. We just need to have the crib put together for now.”

Katara knew she was being a little flexible with the truth. Though she was trying her best to keep him inside as long as she could, the fact was this baby could come at any time and, breastfeeding or not, having a designated area to put him in when she had no choice but to leave for an hour or two would be handy.

By the time she returned from her thoughts, Zuko had already stuffed his feet into his boots and was rooting through his desk drawer.

“What are you gonna do?” she asked as he pulled out a key. The one to the hawkery, she recognised.

“Fetch the most creative person I know.”

* * *

“So,” Sokka said as he toed a ridge in one of the stone tiles. “-why am I here?”

“I thought it’d be nice for Katara to see you guys since she didn’t get to come to Kyoshi Island like she planned. She’s just about sick of the sight of me by now.” Zuko answered with a shrug. “And I could use a hand putting this place together. You’ve got a good eye for this sort of stuff.”

He slung an arm around his shoulders. “Why, thank you, my dear sweet brother-in-law.”

“Don’t push it.”

As always, Sokka was immune to reproach and cheerfully knuckled the side of the Fire Lord’s head with a laugh.

“Anything in mind for all this?” he asked as he gestured to the disarrayed space.

Zuko shook his head. “Not at all. It’s your oyster.”

Clearly pleased with the clean slate and the implied promise of little to no interference with his thought process, Sokka sidled over to the pile of disorganised nursery furniture. He pulled out the changing table and - after a brief pause to survey the dimensions of the room - confidently hauled it over to his chosen spot. And it was a good spot, too. Even though there was no other pieces to compliment it yet, it looked _right_. Zuko hadn’t been lying earlier. Sokka did have an uncanny eye for where things belonged.

Zuko was ridiculously glad that he was here. Left to his own devices, he’d have probably dithered over that decision for far too long.

It was nice to have him here for sentimentality, too. Sokka had a way of writing in his weekly letters that made it feel as though he were in the room with them no matter how far away he really was. There was no substitute for his actual company, however, and it had been a while since they’d been graced with it. Sokka was as busy as they were - spending half his life in flux between his duties in the South Pole and his life with Suki on Kyoshi Island - and the older they got, the more hurdles to their meeting-up seemed to appear. It was probably only going to get worst now that he and Katara would have a baby to think of and Sokka and Suki probably wouldn’t be too far behind them in creating that particular obstacle themselves.

After the difficulty they’d had with this pregnancy, Zuko doubted that a sibling would be forthcoming - if it ever happened at all - so the prospect of his kid having a cousin around instead was appealing.

The thought of getting to see Sokka a little less, though, was a significant drawback.

He was a pain in the ass of a brother-in-law, but Sokka was possibly the best friend he had.

So Zuko seized the moment and made the most out of his company. Between him being Fire Lord and Sokka being the deputy chief of the tribe now, there was plenty to talk about and - with the regular back-and-forth and underhand raillery they usually indulged in - the task of whipping the nursery into shape didn’t seem so huge anymore.

Just as the room was finally beginning to take coherent shape, Sokka stopped in his tracks as he was wrestling with a storage cabinet.

“How’s Katara?”

Zuko frowned as he slotted the books into the case. “You just saw her.”

“Yeah, but I’m her brother. She’s not going to show a weakness in front of me if she can help it. If anyone should understand that, it’s you, what with Azula being your sister.” Sokka grunted as he gave the dresser one last shove into the corner. “How is Katara _really_?”

Zuko took a pause to stew over the question. Like he hadn’t spent practically every waking moment worrying about her for the last month.

“I think she’s okay. As much as she can be. When it happened, she was... I can’t even think of a word that covers it. _Devastated_. Everything had been going so perfectly up till then and it was so unexpected; I think that made it all that much worse. That first night,” Zuko shook his head, as if he could shake out the memory “-I’ve never seen her cry like that. She was hysterical, because the most important thing in the world to you is hanging in the balance and every fibre of your being is telling you to _do_ something but you can’t. You just can’t.”

“I’m sorry.” Sokka said quietly, frozen on the spot.

Zuko shrugged. “Thanks, Sokka, but it’s nobody’s fault. It’s just one of those things. We were unlucky, but we coped with it. We had to.”

“And it’s better now?”

“The tear can’t be fixed. She tried to heal it herself, but it didn't work. That’s why she has to stay on bed rest till the end, but it hasn’t got any worse, the baby is healthy and Katara should still be able to have a normal birth, rather than surgery. There’s not really much more that I can ask for.”

“You’re still stressed out, though.” 

He laughed. “I was stressed out way before all of this.”

“About your dad?” he pressed carefully.

Suddenly, Zuko had an acute sense of peril, like a hare hog triggering the wire of a snare. He definitely wanted to shut this conversation down, but it was already too late; Sokka had already opened him up, compromised him emotionally, and the trap was closed.

Still, he gave a last-ditch attempt to avoid this topic. “Yeah. About my dad. But with everything that’s going on right now, me agonising about my childhood trauma is really not that important.”

“Uh, yeah.” Sokka insisted as he leaned against the dresser. “It is.”

“Fine.” he sighed exasperatedly. “People learn how to be parents from their parents, so how am I supposed to be a good father when all I know about it is what I got from Ozai?”

“Zuko, if you’re this worried about being a bad father, then you literally can’t be one. Ozai wasn’t worried and that’s why he could do all the bad stuff. Because he didn’t care about hurting you. He didn’t care about _you_.” Zuko knew that was the truth - he’d told it to himself a thousand times - but still he flinched. Sokka’s tone softened a little. “Now, you and I both know how much you care about Katara, about this kid, so you’re not gonna do any of that stuff. You _can’t_.”

Before Zuko even got a second to process any of that, there was another voice at the door.

“How are things coming in here?”

They turned to find Katara and Suki in the frame, back from their ‘girls chat’.

“Shouldn’t you be resting?” Sokka asked his sister and he actually looked somewhat concerned.

Suki rolled her eyes as she helped Katara lower herself into the armchair in the corner in the most dignified way possible. “She’s pregnant, not dying.”

“To be fair to him, the most I’m allowed to do right now is sit and breathe.” Katara huffed as she settled in the chair. “I _am_ allowed to choose where I do it though. And we thought you might like some company.”

“Yeah right, you just wanted to come and boss us around.” Sokka smirked, arms folded.

She just glared. “I can’t do anything myself, I think I’ve earned that right.”

In advance of an infamous sibling dispute erupting, Katara winced, an sharp gust of air hissing between her teeth as her hand came up to cradle the underside of her stomach. Only Suki had the common sense to stay put, as the boys lurched forward.

They both stopped in their tracks when Katara gave them a dangerous look.

“I told you I’m _fine_ , stop fussing me. Like Suki said: pregnant, not dying. The baby’s just kicking pretty hard.” she said, tips of her fingers swirling over what had to be the centre of the movement as she turned to her brother. “Want to come and feel?”

Zuko was fully expecting Sokka to balk at the offer - Katara had told him how he’d firmly dodged the expecting mothers in their village when they were kids, about his fainting experience with Ying and her baby - but surprisingly he went straight to his little sister’s side and let her position his hand on her bump.

“Wow, that’s... _weird_. It feels like a little alien is going to bust right out of you.”

“ _Sokka_.” Suki admonished. “That’s your niece or nephew you’re talking about.”

“What? It _does_.”

Remarkably, Katara laughed and Zuko took a moment to lament the sheer unfairness of it. There had been points in this pregnancy where Katara would have either torn his head off or burst into tears - or both - if he’d said that to her.

(It _did_ feel like an alien, but Zuko still didn’t have quite enough faith in Katara’s hormonal stability to agree with Sokka out loud)

“I brought something for you. Well, actually, it’s for the baby but since he or she is still, you know, _in your womb_ , I thought you might like to accept it on their behalf.” Sokka said as he reached into his bag and drew out a box. “I know you said you had everything already but I’m pretty sure you don’t have this and you _need_ this. And no, it’s _not_ a boomerang.” He cut Zuko off with a impish grin when he opened his mouth to protest. “They’re getting that when they’re older.”

Katara frowned.

If there was one thing that she and Zuko hadn’t had to consider during this pregnancy, it was the material requirements. A seemingly never-ending stream of well-wishers had given them everything an infant could possibly need and then some. Before the complications had confined her to her bed and Zuko had taken the responsibility off her hands, she’d been dreading the prospect of organising it all. This kid hadn’t even been born yet and already he or she had more clothes, toys and books than Katara had ever seen in one place - shops included. Someone - probably Piandao - had even sent them a pair of dao swords, smaller and the blades blunted for training purposes, but otherwise exactly like Zuko’s set.

Katara had been horrified. Zuko did an admirable job of pretending that he wasn’t thoroughly enjoying the inferred idea.

The Fire Lady hadn’t been forgotten and had been liberally showered with gifts, too. Some of had been well-intentioned but useless, like the obnoxiously large bouquets and sparkly jewellery, but many of the women who were mothers themselves had been thoughtful; maternity dresses in ascending degrees of looseness to accommodate a growing belly, food hampers filled with the odd things that their babies had craved, oils to soothe stretched skin, scented candles and incense to ease her through the labour.

Even now, after years of seeing the Fire Nation court up close, Katara still wasn’t comfortable with the excess of royalty and she was sure she never would be. Nonetheless, Zuko had strongly warned her not to give any of it away. Inadvertently putting someone’s nose out of joint had a lot more consequences when she was the Fire Lady.

So this baby had remained very well provided for. Katara couldn’t think of anything that they didn’t already have that Sokka could have acquired.

She tilted her head curiously at the white box that her brother placed on the little space at the edge of her lap that wasn’t occupied by her belly. “What is it?”

“Open it and you’ll see.”

From the manner in which he bestowed it and the way he was excitedly looking between her and Zuko - unnervingly similar to how Momo behaved when he presented people with something ‘cool’ he’d happened upon - Katara was quite certain that Sokka had either found or made whatever was in the box himself. That realisation only piqued her interest more.

She removed the lid and sifted through a few layers of tissue paper to find a solid metal halo, perhaps the length of her forearm in circumference, with four sturdy links reaching to the centre where they attached to a clasp.

She looped a few fingers through the hole of the clasp and tried to lift the contraption. Only, it kept coming. Even when Katara had her hand held up as high above her head as it would go, part of it was still in the packaging. Zuko came to her side and took it from her, raising the mysterious object out of the box entirely.

Katara gasped when she finally realised what it was.

Sokka had built a baby mobile, one wrought in the traditional fashion of their people but also slightly unique to their unborn.

Nearest to Katara, the Fire Nation was represented; metal moulded into the shapes of the teardrop-shaped emblem of the royal family, lightning bolts, dragons, lion turtles, hung from the wider branches by tapering chains. Woven in between them were tiny orange and red glass beads that glowed in the sun, shimmering and swaying like an actual flame when Zuko suspended the mobile from his fingers and turned it around to reveal the opposite side. Of course, Sokka had fashioned the Water Tribe for her, too; in crystals of various whites and blues, resembling little raindrops or shards of ice, and an array of other metal charms, one of which she reached out to hold in her palm; a likeness of an otter penguin.

Tears sprung to her eyes.

This baby had made Katara cry a lot so far. Zuko had grown accustomed to it. Sokka hadn’t.

“Hey, don’t cry.” he said, clearly startled. “You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.”

“No, Sokka, I’m just touched that you went to so much effort and the kid is making me over-emotional about it. It’s perfect.”

Sokka grinned in a mixture of relief and pride.

“Really? I’m glad you like it. Gran Gran showed me how to make the basic structure. The rest I kinda figured out as I went along. Suki helped a lot, too.” He shared a smile with his wife as he took the mobile from Zuko to admire his handiwork. “I mean you’ll have to hang it pretty high so she can’t pull it down on herself but I figured it’d be nice for her to look at before she goes to sleep and when she wakes up in the morning.”

“ _He_ ,” Katara said pointedly as she wiped the tears off. “-is going to love it.”

As Sokka leaned down for his sister to embrace him and Zuko offered his thanks to Suki with a hug, the two men made eye contact. Zuko dipped his head in a nod that said everything for him. Sokka reciprocated.

He was immensely glad that this child was going to have Uncle Sokka.

##  **month 9:**

“Where are you going?”

“I told you last night. It’s the equinox ceremony today.”

Zuko couldn’t help but smile at her as she sat up in bed to watch him. Hair bedraggled into a hurricane of brown curls, eyes bleary from a long overdue deep sleep, nightshirt riding up over her stomach - she was adorable, though she'd probably smack him over the head if he said as much. Her tummy was protruding so much now that it was almost like its own entity, making it impossible for him to even lay near her at night without touching it in some way (not that he had a problem with that at all). He knew Katara had atleast two more weeks to go before the due date and he knew that their baby might continue to get heavier in that time, but still Zuko couldn’t quite grasp that her belly even had the capacity to grow bigger than it was already. How it was possible for women to carry two, or even three, babies in the womb together was truly beyond his comprehension.

“I want to come with you.”

Zuko chuckled as he twisted a band around the base of his topknot to secure it in place. “No, you don’t. And you’re supposed to be resting, anyway.”

Katara folded her arms over her bump stubbornly and glared at him. “Doctor Maho and I agreed that I didn’t have to stay in bed twenty-four-seven anymore. You were there.”

“I was there.” he agreed. “She said you could get up to do some light exercise. As in going for a walk around the gardens, not going out on state business.”

“Come on, I need a change of scenery and getting to see and talk to someone other than you and Yumiko would be really good, too. No offence, Yumi.” she said to the maid who had been by her side since she’d first arrived in the Fire Nation as an ambassador.

“None taken, my Lady.” Yumiko smiled as she made some final adjustments to Zuko’s dress robes for him. “It must be really hard on you, having to stay cooped up in here all the time. Especially when you're so active normally - here, there and everywhere."

“Exactly!” Katara exclaimed.

Zuko tsked at Yumiko as he knelt down slightly to let her fit the five-pronged crown into his topknot. 

“Katara, trust me, you really don’t want to come to this. It’s a long, boring ceremony where I basically just have to sit there and look regal for a few hours while the Fire Sages give a sermon about the fruits of the past summer, the favour of the spirits and whatnot. You’re not missing anything, I promise. That’s why I never suggested you come to last three. It’s more of a chore than a celebration.”

Zuko still had that look on his face that suggested he would say anything required to make her stay put, so she turned to Yumiko quizzically.

There was a time where a maid would have been petrified at the request of speaking her mind to the Fire Lord and Lady, but things had changed. Yumi was more of a friend than their help though she still continued using their titles rather than their names, in spite of their regular insistence otherwise over the years.

“I’m sorry, my Lady, but I have to agree with the Fire Lord. If you’re thinking it will be like Solstice Day, then I can tell you myself that it’s nothing like that. Solstice Day marks the beginning of summer, when the firebenders are at their strongest and the Fire Nation really comes alive, so it’s a happy time. Today marks the end of summer, with the autumn equinox tomorrow, so it’s a much more sombre occasion. A bit like a funeral.”

A funeral, indeed.

She could tell Zuko was a little disappointed that their baby wasn’t going to be born during the summer. Of course, that didn’t mean that their baby _wasn’t_ a firebender - Zuko had been born out of season himself - nor would it have guaranteed that he was one even if he had arrived in the summer. That said, it would have gone over nicely with the more questioning of their people if the new heir had been born in the Fire Nation’s peak. While Zuko had consolidated his position well over the last nine years, he still wasn’t quite stable enough to pass up an opportunity to gain some extra approval. That was especially true when it came to their marriage. Even among the ones that liked Katara as Fire Lady - which, she was happy to say, seemed to be the majority - were nervous at the possibility that the firstborn child of the Fire Lord might not be a firebender, even though Zuko had already taken steps to reassure the public that the heir would have to be a firebender.

It was low of her, scrimping an idea off of his political insecurity, but then again, she was feeling pretty desperate herself.

“I haven’t been seen by anyone outside of our household in over a month. People have got to be wondering if there’s something wrong with me and the baby.”

Katara knew for a fact that they were. Only last week, Zuko had heard a rumour circulating in the walls of his own home; that Lady Katara had disappeared from view because she’d already given birth, but the child was evidently not a firebender so they were swapping out the real royal baby for someone else’s - replacing their own child with the offspring of two firebenders.

It was just gossip, both ridiculous and malicious, but it was gossip that could seriously come back to haunt them one day. When the day came for Zuko to relinquish the Fire Lord mantle, either because he was dying or retiring (he hadn’t decided yet), if there was even the slightest bit of doubt over whether Zuko was the biological father of the successor, their son or daughter could wind up exiled, or even dead. 

Zuko had to know that taking his very obviously still-pregnant wife out in public would dispel the whispering in an instant. Yet he hadn’t suggested they act on that because he hadn’t seen fit to share the story with her at all - Yumi had. 

Zuko set his jaw. “There _is_ something wrong with you and the baby.”

“I’m well enough to go to this ceremony and you know it.”

“Katara-”

“Boring or not, it will be good for me to be seen in public.” 

Clearly stuck at an impasse, the Fire Lord turned to the only other person currently in the palace that his wife would listen to. The girl rubbed the back of her neck nervously before she said: “She’s right, my Lord.”

“Whose side are you on, Yumiko?” Zuko was only half-joking in his exasperation.

“Zuko, it’s no further a walk to the temple than it is to the gardens and after that, like you said, we’ll be sat down the whole time. The baby and I will be perfectly fine, just please take me with you.”

His golden eyes glanced between her and Yumiko a few times before he knew he was defeated.

“Yumi, would you please go and inform the Fire Sages that the Fire Lady will be joining us for the ceremony? Make sure they cushion her seat for her.”

“Of course, my Lord, but don’t you want me to help the Fire Lady get dressed?”

“It’s alright. I’ll help her.”

The room was awfully quiet after Yumiko took her leave. Katara winced at the sharp pang at the base of her spine as she slipped out from under the covers but that had to be expected by now, given how much weight their baby was putting on her bones. The pain ebbed away when she wound some spare bindings around her middle to brace her bump, so she struggled into a plain blue maternity dress to go under her robes and sat down at her dressing table. This was probably the longest she’d ever gone without using her vanity, she realised, as she dragged her comb through her hair, sorting her waves out into her natural parting. 

In her mirror, she watched as Zuko pulled out her formal Fire Lady attire.

“Are you angry with me?”

“No.” Zuko retorted, slamming the closet door with a contradictory bang.

She raised an eyebrow at him and their eyes met in her reflection.

He stared for a long moment, before he crossed the room to stand behind her. He took her comb from her hand and finished teasing the knots from her curls without so much as a snag. For a second, Katara wished that Zuko was right about their baby, that it was a girl she was carrying, so that she could watch him be so gentle with their daughter.

“I’m sorry. I’m not angry. Not really.” he said eventually with a sigh. “I know what you’re saying makes sense and I know you wouldn’t do anything to jeopardise our baby’s life.” He tied up her hair and threaded the bun through her coronet. “It’s just... I want you to be safe, that’s all. Both of you.”

“I know.” she said soothingly, covering the hand he placed on her shoulder with her own. “Better to care too much than too little, Zuko.”

He froze at that. She saw the old ghost of Ozai flash in his eyes before he swallowed it down. “Quite.” 

Zuko slid the pin into her headpiece to hold it in place. He turned to grab her Fire Lady robes from their hanger as she stood, raising them up at her height so she could slip her arms into the sleeves. She shrugged the weighty material over her shoulders and backed into him, her spine pressed to his chest. After a second of hesitation, he fitted his arms around her in the minimal gap left between her belly and her breasts, the latter of which felt just as heavy and engorged as the former, already full of milk to nourish her baby.

For a moment, she was content, as he held her tight, cheek pressed to the back of her head. But then, in their reflection, she saw the disquiet swirling in his eyes.

“You’re not going to be like him.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” 

She turned to face him.

“No, I don’t.” he admitted. “But my mother’s told me, Uncle’s told me and you... you’ve told me a thousand times. Agni, even _Sokka_ tried to tell me _._ All people I trust and I didn’t believe any of you. I..., I _couldn’t_ believe you _._ I think it’s up to me,” He rested a palm over where their baby lie. “- to prove to myself that I can do this right.”

He’d already told her that her reassurances would be in vain, so she settled for rising up on her toes and pressing her forehead to his.

He sucked in a breath sharply, like he’d been thinking she’d be upset with his honesty, but then he leaned into it, his other hand coming up to join the other resting on her bump.

“Come on.” he said eventually. “Let’s go and say goodbye to the summer.”

She thought of all the days and nights she’d spent over the last few months laying on the bed, perpetually hot and dripping with sweat no matter what she did.

“It would be my pleasure.”

* * *

Katara knew she had made a grave mistake the second she sat down.

The Sages had placed them front and centre on a dais - not quite as elevated as their spot in the throne room, but near enough - where all eyes could be on them. Katara had thought herself used to the exposure that came with being royalty by now, but being pregnant had seemingly returned her self-consciousness with a vengeance. The feel of the stares on her swollen middle made her want to fold in on herself, shield her baby from the view of all these strangers. The relief of having the murmurs quietened and the ogling redirected to the High Sage as he began the service was short-lived when she realised Zuko hadn’t been exaggerating the dullness of the ceremony. If anything, he’d underdone it. If it weren’t for her acute discomfort, her brain would probably already have tuned itself out. 

Her back _hurt_.

Despite the staff’s best efforts to soften it for her with some cushions, the straight-backed wooden thrones they were sat on were highly uncomfortable.

After a few minutes had passed since the commencement of the service, and she knew for sure that attention was fully directed to the High Sage and not on her, she altered her posture ever so slightly but the sensation was unaffected.

At first, she was almost grateful of the twinges that she wrote off as mere practice contractions - she'd had more than her fair share of them over the course of her pregnancy. They were a suitable distraction from the High Sage’s monotonous preaching; hurting but not too much, coming and going in a steady rhythm. The similarity to her waterbending, the way it called back old memories - the push and the pull, the tide breaking on the shore - was almost relaxing but eventually she couldn’t ignore that while the gaps between the waves were shrinking, the crest of the pain was only reaching higher with each set.

Eventually, her discomfort had grown palpable enough to encourage her to shift her weight a little more boldly but no matter how she positioned herself, the ache refused to be tempered.

She knew what she’d say if another woman came to her with this complaint.

Contractions. Real contractions.

Almost as if to confirm that she'd landed at the right conclusion, another pain burst through from her back and tensed the muscles of her stomach, the sensation ever sharper.

Katara looked at Zuko out of the corner of her eye. He was genuinely interested by the Fire Sages or doing a fantastic job of pretending he was. Either way, he was completely oblivious to what was unfolding just next to him. 

She wondered how she was going to alert him to her predicament without making too much of a scene.

She quickly deduced that there wasn’t a way out of this that didn’t involve immediately catapulting Zuko into a panic. When she thought of that, when she remembered earlier - how he’d loudly objected to her attending the ceremony purely on the basis of something like this happening - and she realised just how _smug_ he’d be, even with all the stress on top. Suddenly the situation didn’t seem so dire.

The pain wasn’t _that_ bad. 

She couldn’t be in _real_ labour yet. 

Maybe it _could_ wait a little longer.

So she sat. She sat and she watched as the shadows of the muntins in the temple windows stretched longer and longer against the floor, as the Fire Sages worked their way at a painfully slow pace through each of the symbolic lightings of the incense sticks, as the High Sage droned his way through each of the obnoxiously long accompanying speeches, until suddenly, she couldn’t take it anymore and she grabbed at Zuko.

Zuko probably would have been notified of her distress purely because she was mangling his hand with about as much force as if he’d stuck it through a meat grinder. If he’d somehow failed to notice that, he definitely would have heard the high-pitched cry that she trapped in the back of her throat behind gritted teeth, fresh tears welling up and stinging her eyes at the sheer agony of the contraction.

Sure enough, he looked down between the arms of their thrones where her hand was clenching his, then up at her.

As soon as their eyes locked, he knew.

This ceremony may well be boring, but it was still a hugely sacred service. It would be the height of disrespect for them to just get up and leave, no matter what the reason, and Zuko needed the sages on his side - not only because they were still important figures in the running of state but also because he needed them to baptise and bless the child that was apparently going to make its arrival shortly - but that was exactly what they were going to have to do. 

Perhaps with a little time, Zuko might have figured out a way to appropriately manoeuvre them out of this situation. He wouldn’t get to find out, because before he was even aware of what he was doing, he’d jumped to his feet so abruptly that he almost toppled his chair, the wood scraping loudly on the stone floor.

The High Sage trailed off mid-verse. All eyes swivelled to the Fire Lord as he stood motionless on the dais. The temple was so silent that he could have sworn he heard the sizzle of the incense burning from across the hall.

“Please forgive us, but the Fire Lady and I have to take our leave.” he blurted out and with that hanging in the air, Zuko tugged Katara up by her sleeve and unceremoniously hustled her off into the nearest space he could find - an antechamber, just behind the plinth they’d been sitting on, that had once been used as a meditation room, if the rolled up mats and piles of scented sticks were anything to go by.

So much for a graceful exit. 

He knew there was going to be consequences but he’d worry about it some other time, when his wife wasn’t about to give birth.

“What were you _thinking_?” he yelped as he slammed the door behind them. 

“Keep your voice down!”

It was all Katara could do to stumble over to the nearest chair that looked of questionable stability, shocked by the sudden intensity of the past contraction, and sit herself down in it. She steadied on the chair as the last bit of pain subsided, ready to defend herself, but before she could say a word, there was a bursting sensation somewhere deep inside her. She stared down at her belly and gasped as something hot began to dampen the fabric of her underclothes. Katara hitched her skirts to her thighs to frantically to scrutinise the fluid trickling down her legs. It wasn’t blood. Blood wasn’t clear, slightly tinged with yellow, but amniotic fluid was. Her waters had broken. 

This baby wanted out.

Zuko was stunned, mouth open, before he said so quietly it was almost a whisper: “Did you really just sit for three hours, _in labour_ , just to... to _spite_ me?”

Somehow, her face grew hotter than it already was. “Kind of.” she admitted sheepishly.

He shook his head in disbelief. “You’re unbelievable.”

Katara tried to smile, but another contraction suddenly hit her. If she thought the last one was bad, this one was worse. _Way_ worse. The sensation took her breath away - almost. She still had enough in her to manage a loud groan as the pain built and built and built until she was doubled over with the force of it. Zuko fell to his knees and she latched onto his hands for comfort. After about forty seconds, she let out a sigh of relief and leaned back in her seat.

“And amazing. You're amazing.” Zuko finished, resisting the urge to flex his fingers when she released him. “We’re having a baby.”

“No, _I’m_ having a baby. You don’t have to push a watermelon-headed kid through your private parts.” she huffed. Zuko decided it was probably best to refrain from correcting her as to the size of their baby's head - not if he wanted to survive long enough to see their child born. “Speaking of having babies, maybe you should go and get someone so I can give birth in my room and not on some musty old meditation mat.”

“Oh. Oh right, yes, of course.” he stuttered, getting to his feet and backing away to the door.

Zuko was so worked up that it took him a good five minutes longer than necessary to explain to the guards the sages must have fetched exactly what he wanted them to do. He probably would have taken longer still if Katara hadn’t had another contraction, forcing him to hurriedly spit out the rest of his instructions, slam the door in their faces and dash straight back to her side.

“The doctor is on her way.” he told her as he knelt back down next to her and reached for her hand. “Are you alright?”

She had a sharp answer waiting to lash from her tongue - _“Of course I’m not alright, you idiot, your baby is trying to force its way out of me!”_ \- but she could see in his eyes that he didn’t mean physically. He was trying to feel her out emotionally.

On account of her being the one in labour, Katara absolutely believed that she had the shorter end of the stick here, but neither was there any doubt in her mind that the next few hours were going to be rough for Zuko, too. Seeing her in pain and being unable to make it stop - or even just _help_ her - was not going to be pleasant for him. She atleast owed him comfort while she could still offer it.

Katara had believed long before she was ever pregnant that when the time came, she wouldn’t be afraid to give birth. She was familiar enough with the process that she recognised it as the natural process that it was. She could see both the beauty in it like Gran Gran did, and the grossness of it like Toph did. She had, however, expected to be nervous. All of the labouring women that had come to her family’s tent seeking her grandmother's help, regardless of whether they were first-time mothers or fifth, had been. It was perfectly understandable, given the awareness of the pain and stress they were about to go through, and the incomprehensible knowledge that they were going to have a whole new person with them when they left that tent, but all Katara felt was relief.

It hadn't been easy, and it wasn’t over yet, but she’d made it relatively close to term and her baby was healthy. All that was left now was finally getting to hold the little soul she’d been carrying around with her for the last nine months.

“Yeah. I’m ready.” she said. “I just want to meet him now.”

Zuko nuzzled her palm as she cradled the scarred side of his face, even though he couldn’t feel her touch there. 

“ _Her_. You want to meet _her_.” he corrected with an anxious smile.

The door squeaked open and the blessedly familiar face of Doctor Maho peeked around the frame expectantly. 

Katara took in a deep breath and squeezed his hand.

“Guess we’re about to find out.”

* * *

“I can see the head, my Lady. You're almost there. Just a few more pushes and it’ll be over.”

Zuko was exhilarated and petrified and he was pretty sure Katara had systematically broken all the bones in his fingers so he probably didn’t think it through properly when he said: “Talk about cutting it fine, huh, Katara?”

“Shut up, Zuko!” 

Katara tried to snap and glare at her husband, but the effect was entirely lost when her tone lifted up into a half-manic laugh as she got the words out, amused by the image of her delivering a baby at the Fire Sages’ feet. Heir to the throne or not, she couldn’t imagine that they would be very happy about the bloody mess that was currently splattered on their bedsheets being on their temple floor instead. She didn’t know if Zuko had had the same thought, or if he was just caught up somewhere in the tumultuous swirl of emotion that was consuming them both, but he laughed, too - right before she crushed his hand again.

The pain was awful - far, far worse than she could ever have imagined - but atleast she was finally getting somewhere. That impossibly long hour after they'd returned to their suite had been purgatory in a very literal sense - trapped in a doldrums of endless pacing and useless hurting, her nails digging deep half-moons into Zuko's arm. It had made her almost _grateful_ for the fever-pitch of agony that was racking her body now. Atleast her pain had gained a tangible purpose because even without Doctor Maho’s authoritative encouragements, she could feel it.

This baby was coming, here and now.

"I know we said atleast two,” she panted as the contraction waned. “-but how'd you feel about one-and-done?"

Zuko had learned his lesson the first time. 

"Whatever you want, Katara.” he responded dutifully as he wiped the sheen of sweat from her forehead with a cool rag.

Another contraction slammed into her barely a split second after the last one had begun to weaken, strong enough now that Zuko could actually _see_ the muscles of her abdomen clenching from the outside. Katara could hear her Gran Gran’s voice in her head telling her not to bother with noise - that it was only wasting energy that would be better spent pushing at the baby, drawing things out longer than they needed to be - but she couldn’t help but howl through gritted teeth as she bore down. It _burned_ , just the same way as it had when Aang's fire had brushed her hands all those years ago. The pressure at her centre was incomprehensibly powerful, forcing her body to stretch and make way beyond what seemed possible. She could feel every tiny but agonising shift as her baby’s head inched out of her for every millimetre her muscles relented. The pain was unbearable - if she didn't know any better, she'd say it was going to kill her - but even if she had wanted to stop it, she couldn't. It was a kind of primal, cathartic nature that she couldn't quite quantify.

Judging her to be nearing the end of the burst of strength sustaining her push, Zuko wrapped his arm around her in an attempt to hold her upright just as there was a sudden give and a gush of bloody fluid spilled out onto the linens. Katara gasped at the glimpse of something small and dark between her thighs before she leaned back into Zuko's arm and it disappeared beneath the colossal swell of her belly once more.

“The head’s out.” The physician called, one hand pushing ever so slightly on Katara's knee to keep her legs widened and the other reaching back for a towel. “One more big push and he's here. You're done. You can meet your baby.”

Zuko could feel the weight of the moment pressing on his shoulders. He desperately wanted to look but he also thought there was a real possibility that he’d pass out if he did. He wasn’t about to let that happen - Sokka would never let him live it down and did he really want to have explain to his child one day that he was the one that had fainted when his wife was literally _giving birth_? - so he kept his eyes focused firmly on Katara. She didn’t give him much of a chance to gawk at her anyway.

She propped herself up on her elbows, gripped his hand tight, and let out one last bloodcurdling scream as she bore down with the final contraction. 

Before he even knew what was happening, a thin little wail rang out in answer to its mother's cry and just like that, Zuko’s life was distinctly cleaved into a before and an after.

##  **after:**

It ends without the little blue-eyed, brown-haired girl.

Instead, it starts with the young Fire Lord staring straight into a pair of unexpectedly familiar eyes as their newborn is bundled onto Katara’s slackened belly.

Zuko wonders if he’s dreaming all this. He has to be, because those eyes aren’t blue - not like the ocean, not like the sky - but gold. Bright, brilliant gold, glowing like an ore melting over fire and they are unmistakably identical to his own. He wonders if he’s going to wake up any minute now, lying in his bed with Katara beside him, still very much pregnant, and the most normal of days stretching out before them. But then he feels the physician’s hand gripping his shoulder in a congratulatory squeeze from in front of him and Katara is sobbing and the world that has suddenly become a whole lot smaller than it was before comes into sharp focus.

“Congratulations. You have a boy. A healthy baby boy.” Maho announces with an unrestrained smile that looks startling on her face as she rigorously towels off the gore.

His son - _his son,_ Zuko realises _, he has a son,_ it's the first time he's thought it and it’s like he’s about to die from the feeling that’s contorting his heart and frazzling his brain and making ribbons out of his insides - squirms on Katara's bare stomach as the physician finishes cleaning him off, tiny hands grasping the air for purchase. The baby takes a deep breath in and emits a hesitant little whimper, eyes searching around like he's wondering if he’s alone in his existence, in this strange new world that’s so cold and alien compared to his mother’s womb. Zuko instinctively reaches to reassure him but he only gets a second of contact, his fingertips brushing against the damp, warm skin of his son's back, before Katara is there, reaching down and gathering up her baby.

He cries out properly once she’s holding him. He knows he’s safe with his mother there to protect him and Katara looks the most contented she’d ever been in her life.

“Hi, baby. Hi.” she coos as he lets out a few more strong wails, though they seem more to announce his presence than anything else. “It’s okay. Don’t cry. Mommy’s here. Mommy’s got you.”

She shakily cups her hand underneath his head as Doctor Maho slips a white blanket round him, her fingers stroking a wet, dark whorl above his ear. He can’t be sure with the remnants of blood, vernix and other fluids flattening it to his skull but he’s pretty sure that their son has inherited his hair colour, too, and there’s a lot of it. His head is completely covered in thick black tufts.

Katara is still sobbing even as their son begins to quiet down. Her tears drip freely onto the baby's head but he doesn't seem to mind too much as she presses him to her skin.

“You did it, Katara.” he tells her as she hugs their son to her chest tightly. “You did it.”

Finally, she takes a breath and looks up at him. She smiles. All the pain and fear and love and joy that had built up in him over the last nine months - perhaps longer, perhaps over his whole life - breaks through the dam. Hot tears spill over from his eyes and pour unchecked down his cheeks in rivers. 

Zuko wonders how he said no to this for so long. He wonders how he could have ever wanted anything other than what’s in front of him right this second - how he could even have considered living a life without this moment. Everything before simply pales in significance to these seconds and the countless more opening out on the horizon. Every part of him feels as though it is shaking and unsteady but somehow he feels even stronger, even more dangerous, than he was before because he knows in the deepest pits of his soul that he would do _anything_ for this tiny, bloody, squirming bundle of theirs that is half him and half her.

He forgets that Doctor Maho is there at his shoulder, forgets about everything that’s not within the microcosm of his wife and son - his _family_ \- and he kisses Katara, more deeply and passionately than he thinks he ever has before. 

He hopes that she understands - that she hears all the things that words couldn’t convey to her - and when she leans into him, a hand curling into the collar of his robe, he knows that she does.

Eventually, the moment has to break. 

The baby starts wriggling and whining and without a second of doubt, Katara slides the fussing infant down to her breast. After some firm coaxing and a few words of advice from the physician, he finally latches on to her nipple and takes a feed from her before Katara reluctantly hands him over to Doctor Maho. She quickly whisks him away to her intern for weighing, measurements and a thorough health check - though if the devastating cries that rip at Zuko's heart when they take him away from his mother are anything to go by, he’s just fine - while the afterbirth is handled.

Then all of a sudden, Maho is offering them one last congratulations before she takes her leave and - with Katara looking suspiciously like she’d fallen asleep - he’s alone.

Alone, with his barely two-hour old son in his arms.

He remembers Katara telling him that newborns usually sleep for a while after birth - that it was a stressful and tiring experience for them, too - but this baby’s eyes are wide open as Zuko looks down on him with a vague sense of panic. 

“Hello.” he tries, hoping that their son couldn’t tell just how nervous he was.

Those long hours of overcoming his awkwardness and learning to mindlessly talk to Katara’s bump seemed to have paid off as the baby blinks up at him like he recognises his voice. Or at the very least, he sounds familiar enough that he doesn’t immediately start screaming for his mother to come and rescue him from the strange man.

“I’m Zuko. I guess you’re going to be calling me Dad though.”

A rush of warmth flows through him at that thought.

Feeling a little more confident that he’s not going to drop him or make him cry or do _something_ wrong, Zuko wraps up the baby a little tighter in his cobalt blankets, pulls his cap down a little further over his forehead, and steps out onto the balcony. It had felt like an age to him but realistically the birth had been mercifully quick, especially considering Katara's inexperience, just about five hours from beginning to end including the time sat in the ceremony. Still, night had long since fallen over Caldera and the city lights flickered like tiny stars in a sea of black. Zuko looks out, like he often does, and thinks of the people that live out there, of the people that live far beyond the walls of the old volcano. He doesn’t know them, but they know him and their lives - their hopes and dreams, loves and hates, all the things they hold dearest - rest squarely on his shoulders. Sometimes the weight is so heavy that he feels like he’s going to be crushed underneath it; other times, he almost allows himself to forget that it’s there. But it _is_ always there. Or atleast it will be until he passes it along, voluntarily or by death.

Voluntarily had always seemed like the attractive option, especially as a sixteen year old boy with the potential of seventy, eighty, years of life yet to live looming ahead of him, but as he looks down at his little son - his son, who can’t even support the weight of his own head - he’s not so sure anymore.

_He’s not going to stay a baby forever,_ the voice in his head says, _he’ll get big._

The thought doesn’t bring him much comfort. Life didn’t get any easier when you were big.

“Will it be you, huh?” he asks as the child stares up at the stars above them, nose crinkling as the lightest of breezes brushed his face. “Are you going to be the Fire Lord after me?”

If this baby boy has an air of destiny about him - and he does, because even if he’s not the next Fire Lord, there’s no doubt whatsoever in Zuko’s mind that he and Katara’s children will all be meant for _something_ extraordinary - he certainly doesn’t know it. He only gurgles faintly at the sound of his father’s voice, kicking his legs from under the blankets swaddling him. Zuko grabs one of his feet as it sticks out and holds it up in his palm. He can’t really grapple with the fact that these were the very same feet that had woken him up this morning, kicking into the small of his back from inside Katara’s belly as she'd slept beside him.

“I’m getting ahead myself. You might look a lot like me, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll have my bending. You could be a waterbender like your mommy. Or a nonbender, like your Uncle Sokka.”

It was an unfounded belief but Zuko had expected he’d know instinctively if his child was a firebender - that the fire that blazed in his veins would somehow be capable of calling out to another that it had created - but truly he isn’t sure. 

His father talked about there being a spark in the eye of a firebender - a spark so vital that his not having it had almost resulted in him being cast over the palace walls like a broken toy. Zuko often wonders what would have happened to him if the Fire Sages had been feeling a little less generous that day, his mother a little less persuasive. His whole life balanced on a very fine line and there were so many critical moments where if things had not gone exactly that way, he’d have tumbled off into a life so unrecognisable from the one he has now that Zuko questions how much of himself is actually _him_ \- his spirit - and what is the product of fortune.

Zuko doesn't know if there's a spark. He doesn't care. All he sees when he looks into his son’s eyes is how the irises so truly reflect a flame - burning a hot and bright amber at the centre before fading into a burnished orange-gold at the edges. All he sees is how beautiful and flawless and entirely innocent they are.

“If you are like me, then I... I'm sorry. There’s going to be a lot resting on your shoulders and not only because of the Fire Lord stuff. Being a firebender is a huge responsibility, too, and unfortunately you’ll have to learn just how badly things can go when it’s not treated with the respect it deserves.” Zuko bit his lip before he released it with a steadying breath. “But it isn’t all bad. Fire isn’t just destruction and pain; it’s versatility and passion, transformation and divinity. It's life itself.” Even now, he’s still reassuring himself as much as he is his little boy. “I’ll show you how to use it properly. I’ll show you how to be Fire Lord, too, when I figure it out myself. And if it turns out that you don’t need any of that... well, you’ll need to know about your heritage anyway and I’m sure they’ll be other things that I can show you. Maybe I’ll take you to Piandao to train you to use dao swords, or maybe Uncle Sokka and I can teach you, though I’m not too sure that your mom would be happy about that latter arrangement. ”

“I won’t be a perfect teacher and I know that I won’t be a perfect father, either, but I promise to always try my best at both. Whatever it takes.” Zuko tells the baby gently as he offers him a thumb to cling to. “I want you to know that you and your mom are my whole world now. You are all that matters to me. I’ll always be there and I’ll always protect you and by my life, you will _never_ have to go through anything like we did.”

Even when he was young, even when he tried so desperately hard to, Zuko could never understand his father. 

He understands him even less now.

And he says it. 

He says those three words that even now he’s still learning to use, that usually feel clumsy when they roll from his tongue; three words that he has only ever said to an amount of people that he can count with only his fingers. He means it every time but they have never felt more natural in his mouth than they do now.

“I love you.”

There’s something desperately sad about the realisation that his son would never understand just how much until far later in his life, but Zuko doesn’t care and the baby seems to appreciate the moment anyway, lying placidly still as Zuko presses a kiss to his soft forehead and even rewarding him with a happy little cooing noise. Right before it quickly turns into a dissatisfied wail.

Zuko doesn’t even get a second to think about taking him somewhere he wouldn’t disturb Katara before she’s already awake and sat up in bed.

“Give him to me.” she holds out her arms. “He’s hungry.”

Agni knows how she could be so certain already, but he doesn’t question her - of course, he'd always anticipated Katara would be a very natural mother - and he reluctantly hands over their son as he climbs into the bed next to them.

“Come here, sweetie.” she murmurs to the baby as she tucks him into the crook of her elbow with practised ease. She shrugs out of her slip to bare her chest and sure enough, he stops fussing and settles down to nurse, a tiny fist balled up against her breast. "Oh, there we are. Is that better, my love?"

“Katara?” he asks as she gradually reclines against the mountain of pillows at her back, the arm cradling their son as he fed frozen in place.

She lets out a hum of recognition. Her eyes didn't leave her baby boy for a second, brushing her thumb over his round, rosy cheek reverently as he suckled from her. 

“You thought we were having a boy all along. What did you want to call him?”

She looks up at that, blinking in surprise and, in spite of her exhaustion, her eyes were still so vibrant - glimmering like the ocean surface in the light from her bedside candle. “I always assumed that if we had a boy, you’d want to name him in honour of your uncle - either with his name or your cousin’s.” she says, head tilted to the side. “And I’m happy with either.”

_Iroh_.

_Lu Ten._

Now that she said it, it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world. 

Zuko instantly recoiled from the idea of naming his son after Lu Ten - it seemed like a terrible omen, almost an invite for the spirits to do their worst - but Iroh was a good suggestion. It seemed natural and he liked the thought of naming a son after his uncle. But Zuko had always expected his firstborn to be Kya. That had been the name in his head long before Katara had even seriously suggested kids. Kya was the name he was going to proudly say when people asked what his child was called. Kya was going to be the next name woven under his on the family tapestry, the next chapter in the history books.

He should have known better. When had anything in his life ever gone to plan? But maybe it did work out the way it was meant to.

“No.” Zuko says, entranced by his son. “Let’s call him after your mom.”

“I think Kya is a little effeminate for a boy, Zuko. Prince or not, I think people might laugh at him.”

“Obviously, but something like Kyo would work just fine.”

“Or Kaito.” Katara says suddenly. 

_Kaito_.

He and Katara hadn’t put any effort into discussing a name. They’d just silently agreed to wave it off with the _‘we’ll know when meet them’_ explanation when others had tried to lure them into a conversation about it. Now they knew it was because they’d both thought the other had something in mind. But he remembers the book that Gran Gran had sent Katara when she’d first heard the news that her granddaughter was expecting. He remembers that name inked onto the yellowed parchment in the very bottom of the footnotes - a vague last-minute recollection of a name rarely used in the Southern Water Tribe. A name rarely used _anywhere_. Never in the Fire Nation.

_Kaito - the sea / to soar ?_

He looks at their son and even though the most he’s physically inherited from Katara is the wide shape of his eyes and a complexion a few shades darker than his father, this boy is Water Tribe, too. His blood calls to blue, to sweeping glaciers, gyres of snow in the air, the howls of a wolf pack, hazy light straining through the clouds to sparkle the ocean’s surface, just as much as it speaks to the warmth of the sun on the skin.

Zuko pulls his wife and son into his arms.

Maybe Kai works just fine.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a sequel planned for this, but given how long it took me to finish this - and that the world is finally getting back to normal and I'll have to be going to work and going to uni again - I'm not going to make any promises about the when, but I will do it. Hope you enjoyed <3


End file.
